Post-Fordist Performance and the Problem of Fun Agents of Object

FOR KSW/POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM ATTENDEES ONLY
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FROM “THE CUTE, THE ZANY, AND THE MERELY INTERESTING: THREE PROBLEMS FOR AESTHETIC THEORY”
THE ZANY SCIENCE
Post-Fordist Performance and the Problem of Fun
Agents of Object Motion
If a Happening is just “one or another method of using objects in motion,” wrote Claes
Oldenburg in 1965, “this I take to include people, both in themselves and as agents of object
motion.”1 Written just one year after the multiauthored, entertainment-themed Happening Gas
was shot and produced for television by a local CBS-affiliate in New York, Oldenburg’s
definition of the art which so quickly became a media sensation in the late 1950s (as reflected in
titles such as Publicity, The Big Laugh, World’s Fair II, and Gayety) reads strikingly like a
condensed restatement of Kurt Schwitters’s 1925 instructions for making a “Merz composite
work of art”2:
Make locomotives crash into one another, curtains and portieres make threads of spider webs
dance with window frames and break whimpering glass. Explode steam boilers to make
railroad mist. Take petticoats and other kindred articles, shoes and false hair, also ice skates
and throw them into places where they belong, and always at the right time. […] Take in
short everything from the hairnet of the high-class lady to the propeller of the S.S. Leviathan,
always bearing in mind the dimensions of the work.
Even people can be used …
People can even appear actively, even in their everyday position….
While turning manufactured goods into whizzing projectiles is clearly the overarching principle
here, it was ultimately Schwitters’s inclusion of human agents as “nonmatrixed performers,” as
Michael Kirby notes, that made Merz a key high-art precedent for Happenings.3 In contrast to
traditional theatre, where the “performer always functions in (and creates) a matrix of time,
space, and character,” the performer in a happening “merely carries out a task”: carving ham and
vacuuming talcum powder, for instance, or hanging plaster-dipped pennants on clotheslines to
dry in Oldenburg’s Gayety (1963).4 The nonmatrixed performer thus performs, but does not
really “play” in the sense of imaginatively impersonating a character: like an avatar in an early
video game, what is required from the agent is “only the execution of a generally simple and
undemanding action” (17). Kirby’s examples of nonmatrixed performance are thus strikingly
examples of job performance: stagehands moving furniture, classroom teachers teaching, train
conductors calling out stops. Such a task-oriented approach to performing would seem to have
much to do with the strangely not-so-gay mood of Gayety, which for all its title’s promise of fun
and spontaneity, consisted mainly of repetitive actions related to the control of domestic
disorder: washing dishes, kneading dough, scrubbing sinks, erasing blackboards.
We get a very different account of the kind of doing specific to Happenings, however, in
the early writings, if not performances of Allan Kaprow.5 In an untitled 1959 essay printed
alongside “The Demiurge,” the first of his Happening scenarios to appear in print, Kaprow links
the new art form he “always dreamed of” to the intensely affective, unpredictable, and selftransformative activity of a very specific, even “rare” type of human being:6
I have taken my cue from those rare screwballs that emerge every once in a while in expected
places, who are crazy to transform themselves into the Essential Absolute of each moment
that passes through them and who are perhaps in that manner the purest living forms of art.
These men, these marvelously deranged beings, do not (or cannot) stop long enough to call
their selfness a creative thing. They hurl themselves to furious deaths; or collapsed from the
sheer excessiveness of their energy, they open up cigar stands and are never heard from
again. They leave no monuments (and I am tired of monuments, those tokens to eternity),
nor testimonials, but they know more about renewal than the rest of us.
As in the case of the actor praised by Nietzsche in The Gay Science for his ability to create a
“mocking, light, fleeting, [and] divinely untroubled” art,7 the product of the dynamic activity
specific to Kaprow’s “marvelously deranged beings” is “selfness.” But since this selfness is
“creative” in turn, there appears to be no end to the demiurgy of “screwballs”; not only are the
final products of their activity immaterial (leaving “no monuments … nor testimonials”) but the
process seems to be a self-perpetuating loop: furious subjectivity furiously producing
subjectivity as productive.
Between these particular texts by Kaprow and Oldenburg we thus get two very different
models of the kind of activity specific to Happenings: a perfunctory, depersonalized approach to
performing on one hand (Oldenburg); and an improvisatory, charismatic approach to it on the
other (Kaprow). In both cases, however, the ethos is one of what Alexander Galloway, in his
study of video games, calls “polyvalent doing”—actions performed by agents in the presence of
other agents performing the same.8 Whether as the spontaneous activity of Nietzschean beings
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who “do not (or cannot) stop long enough to call their selfness a creative thing” or the repetitive
actions of “agents of object motion,” the art of zaniness seems to be that of a performing that
never stops.
This definition has held true at the level of history as well. From the commedia dell’arte,
Punch and Judy, Tom and Jerry, I Love Lucy, The Price is Right, the Chuck-E-Cheese restaurant
chain, and so many of the video games designed for the Atari 2600 console in the 1980s (Bezerk,
Crackpots, Keystone Kapers, Megamania, Turmoil, Off Your Rocker, Maze Craze, Rampage,
Human Cannonball, Crazy Valet); to Ubu Roi, Futurist variety theater, Dada cabaret, the
detonating sculptures of Jean Tinguely, the political street performances of the Chicano/a artists
in ASCO, and the madcap hijinx of so many postmodern literary texts, from Kathy Acker’s
Blood and Guts in High School to John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run, no aesthetic seems to have
traveled across popular and avant-garde culture for so long—or with as much internal
consistency. Indeed, in jumping so quickly from one example to another—as seems necessary in
order to convey the remarkable range and variety of zany artifacts produced across four centuries
of western culture— my own prose in the previous sentence appears to have taken on the formal
features, and to have replicated the vertiginous effect, of this noisy, aggressive, fast-paced
aesthetic.
Like a game of pinball, Frogger, Pressure Cooker, or Kaboom! (video games in which
avatars have to dodge oncoming cars, fulfill incoming hamburger orders, or catch falling bombs
coming at them at increasing speed) [Fig. 1a-b], the digital art of Young Hae-Chang’s Heavy
Industries (where words are aggressively flashed at the viewer with an acceleration that
eventually makes them unreadable), or any Thomas Pynchon novel (bombarding reader and
protagonist with hundreds of bits of information that may or may not add up to a conspiracy),
zaniness evokes an agent confronted by many things coming at her quickly and at once. This is
the same effect arguably achieved by the aphoristic form of The Gay Science, a seemingly
haphazard series of “experimental language shots” viewed by some critics as explicitly soliciting
a kind of zany, zigzagging reading.9 “Each aphorism is set up as an experiment to be tested,
observed, and, at times, rescinded,” as Avital Ronell notes, making Nietzsche’s text an
interesting example of the intimate relationship between zaniness and the experience of being
challenged which Jon McKenzie has provocatively linked to the concept of performance in
general.10 For the zany performer in Happenings, these challenges primarily took the form of
3
encounters with multiplicity, the contingent, and the unforeseen:11 whether in the form of clay
balls hurled at flowerpots in Gayety, or the dropping of furniture from trees in Kaprow’s Birds
(1964).
It is crucial to note that Happenings were actually carefully pre-planned and orchestrated
affairs, for all their appearance of mayhem and spontaneity. In this they explicitly took after the
interventions of the Situationists, who as Hal Foster notes, “valued precise intervention and
rigorous organization above all things.”13 Daniel Harris nonetheless captures a feature as central
to Happenings as to, say, the Warner Brothers cartoon Roadrunner, when he notes that, “In their
purest form, zany comedies are structureless, picaresque journeys through worlds of dangerous
and volatile inanimate objects. Every prop, indeed, every character, is … a potential
projectile.”14 Indeed, in its embrace of the same “speed and love of danger” celebrated by F. T.
Marinetti in his first Futurist manifesto (1909),15 the zany has lent itself repeatedly to the
stylization of war or military actions; from the clashes staged between the “wall builders” and
“tree women” in Birds; to the battles between the little girls and their various enemies in the
illustrated novel by Henry Darger which inspired Girls on the Run; to the famously projectileobsessed Gravity’s Rainbow. We might think here as well of Wolf Vostell’s final instructions to
the participants of his Vietnam War era You-Happening (1964), with its particularly dark way of
marrying war and entertainment as themes: “Put on a gas mask when the TV burns and try to be
as friendly as possible to everyone.”16 Hyper-attuned and hyper-responsive to the actions of
others (aggressive or friendly), zany performers are constantly moving, and often literally on the
run from challenges hurled their way: whether it be falling anvils and explosives, in the case of
Warner Brothers’s Roadrunner; rolling barrels and fireballs, as in the video game Donkey Kong;
or conscription into endless nanny work for the white elites of south central Louisiana, as we
find Richard Pryor in the closing moments of the dark comedy The Toy (1982), sprinting down a
lonely rural highway as the camera telescopes in on his retreating figure like the sight of a rifle
[Fig. 2a-e]. One thinks here as well of the wild flight from the law of the novelist-impersonator
in Clarence Major’s My Amputations (1986), a novel whose “frantic, rhythmic prose” and
endless barrage of literary allusions, one reviewer noted, “will not be everyone's cup of tea.”17
The style of zaniness clearly pervades forms and genres in every medium (as I’ve been
trying to use my own barrage of cultural examples to demonstrate). But as a highly physical
aesthetic of movement, energy, and force, zaniness is clearly a style that comes to its sharpest
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realization in the arts of time, rather than the arts of space. While one would be hard pressed to
find a zany still life painting, zaniness abounds in video games, film, television, and above all,
the live performing arts. It’s the dominant aesthetic of the Flash-driven digital poetry of Brian
Kim Stefans; of Holly Hughes’s The Well of Horniness and the many other collaborations
between her and Split Britches at NYC’s WOW Café; of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s pedagogical
performances with his San Francisco group La Pocha Nostra; and of Perils, Mayhem, Mercy,
Covert Action, and the other aggressively edited films in filmmaker Abigail Child’s seven-part
series, IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? (Fig. 3a-b). It is also the dominant style of
political protest culture, street mime, and walkabouts (street theater in which costumed
performers improvise interactions with the general public).
As an aesthetic of movement that implies a performer’s heightened responsiveness to the
movements of other bodies, zaniness also finds a particular concentrated expression in dance.
Not all dance, of course: there’s nothing zany about classical ballet or the slow, severe
minimalism of, say, Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966). But certainly vernacular contemporary
genres like crumping and hip-hop, and certainly also Rainer’s Three Seascapes (1962), in which,
like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, a screaming woman “fights” a pile of white tulle and a
black overcoat. One thinks also of the satirical contortions of Berlin cabaret artist Valeska Gert,
in Tango, Charleston, Variety, Circus, Sport, Clown, and other dances based on forms of popular
entertainment from the 1920s and 1930s; the disquieting Chicken Woman dances of performance
artist Linda Montano in the early 1970s; and what Joan Acocella calls the “funny and unsettling”
dance of Sally Silvers, from her “wild child” performances of the 1980s to her recent work built
around poet Bruce Andrews’s Merz-like sound collages (Fig. 4a-e).18
In the arts of language, we find zaniness concentrated in and around the neighborhood of
performative utterances19: a zone often demarcated by italics, dashes, exclamation points, and
other markers of affective insistence. Note, for instance, Madeline Gins’s self-described
explorations of “Power and Being" in WHAT THE PRESIDENT WILL SAY AND DO!! (1984),
whose title poem, like a score for a Happening, or a children’s activity book, consists entirely of
instructions for action.
FILL THE OCEAN WITH COTTON!
HANG SIX SCARLET BANDS TO COME WITHIN INCHES OF FLOOR.
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EVERY CITIZEN SHOULD BE GIVEN A SMALL YELLOW STEAM ENGINE!
KEEP LARGE QUANTITIES OF BRACKISH WATER AWAY FROM EARS.
“TUNNELS MUST CONTAIN TUNNELS!”
ALL ACTIONS AND OUTCOMES FOR ALL CITIZENS TO BE PROJECTED IN A LIT
UP BALL WHICH SITS IN THE CENTER OF EACH VILLAGE!
TURN ANYTHING AROUND AND AROUND FOR ONE DAY.
AMOEBAS SHOULD ALL FACE IN THE SAME DIRECTION!
A SECONDARY USAGE FOR PENIS: PAPERWEIGHT!
DROP WORDS OUT OF CONVERSATION AND SHATTER!
READ YOUR OWN LIPS!
SOME CONCLUSIONS TO BEHAVE AS PARACHUTES OR RIVERS!
Evoking the image of Nixon in particular, zaniness here coalesces around speech acts with
illocutionary and perlocutionary force. In music as well as language, it also becomes particularly
conducive to onomatopoeia or noise: from the screeches, cackles, whistles featured prominently
in Kaprow’s early scores, to the yips, snarls, and sometimes uncategorizable sounds made by
Phil Minton’s Feral Choir or by voice artist Jaap Blonk. The zany is a “hoot,” in more ways
than one. (And for reasons that will soon be made more explicit, the zany is “a character” in
more ways than one, too.)
Of all the aesthetic styles examined in this book, the zany is obviously the most vehement
and charged with affective intensity—the one most invested with will, desire, and aggression. It
is also the only one with a particular relationship to action, as reflected in the term’s remarkably
longstanding, if now obsolete use as a verb, meaning to imitate or mimic. We might say that the
zany zanies, which always seems to result in a giant mess: smashed furniture, wrecked cars,
burning trash, and strawberry jam all over the place, in the case of Kaprow’s Birds and
Household, or in the case of the solo performances of Karen Finley, cling peaches, chocolate,
and the eponymous yams from Yams Up My Granny’s Ass (Fig. 5a-c). This last example
particularly underscores (in a not-so nice way) how much of the body one confronts in the zany.
6
If the interesting is cool, and the cute, warm and fuzzy, the zany is hot under the collar, hot and
bothered, hot to trot—idioms which point directly to the affects and desires of a human body
compelled to move, hustle, dance, run. Note how Pryor is in the process of getting “hot-footed,”
in this promotional image for The Toy (Fig. 6). Even when the performing body is not as frontand-center as Pryor’s or Finley’s (and even when it is not literally visible, as in the poetry of
Gins or Bruce Andrews), when it comes to being zany a body is always strongly implied.
While playful in all of its manifestations across various media, the zany has a strained
and slightly desperate quality that immediately sets it apart from its more easygoing cousins, the
kooky, goofy, or screwy. This has made it the dominant style of late twentieth-century comedies
about subjects under economic duress. Take, once again, The Toy, a film about an unemployed
vet staring down the barrel of impending poverty during the oil crisis and recession in the 1970s.
Take also Rafael Fajardo’s Crosser, an online computer game in which the goal of the avatar is
to cross, without “dying,” the border separating Mexico (screen bottom) from the U.S. (screen
top).20 Modeled explicitly after Frogger, Crosser depicts the geopolitical scene of South/North
immigration as one of “collision detection,”21 as Rita Raley puts it, with the avatar zigzagging
around air and border patrol, highway traffic, and dead bodies in his scramble to get to the US
side. It must be immediately noted, however, that Fajardo darkly pairs Crosser on the website of
his artists’ collective, SWEAT, with a game in the same aesthetic and stylistic register that
exactly reverses its scenario. This is La Migra (“immigration patrol”), in which a Minutemanlike avatar drives a car to “block” Mexican aliens “descending,” as in the 1980s game Space
Invaders, from Mexico (screen top) into the U.S (screen bottom). By creating these two games
in the same overall style, Fajardo suggests that zaniness is a general condition of the global
multitude, of any avatar who “voluntarily” hustles, anyone one “driven” to move under
conditions of economic stress. He also underscores that zaniness is politically ambiguous; as
liable to be adopted for its expressive qualities by both sides of the spectrum. Zaniness is the
dominant style, strikingly, of much late twentieth-century feminist performance art, from the
institutional interventions of the Guerilla Girls, to Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, with
its knife-wielding, “slightly maniacal home cook” (1973-1974), to Bio Tek Kitchen (1999), a
computer game on the “theme of public IP loss via biotech patenting” by Josephine Starrs and
Leon Cmielewski, in which players try to “clean up the kitchen laboratory of a home biotech
enthusiast using weapons such as dish cloths and egg flippers” while being “attacked by nasty
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mutant vegetables which are the product of genetic nouvelle cuisine.”22 But it is also the
dominant style of Nietzsche’s vehement attacks on feminism, democracy, liberalism, socialism,
and all philosophies and political movements based on egalitarianism, as Wyndham Lewis
suggests in this telling characterization of him in The Art of Being Ruled: “Nietzsche, got up to
represent a Polish nobleman, with a berserker wildness in his eye, advertised the secrets of the
world and sold little vials containing blue ink, which he represented as drops of authentic blue
blood, to the delighted populace.”23
In any case, far from being “divinely untroubled,” like the airy and nimble art called for
the Gay Science, the art of the zany is not just frantic, but fraught—an art that goes “beserker.” It
thus points to an interesting ambiguity in Nietzsche’s own aesthetic preferences. For there seems
to be a world of difference between the “light,” “fleeting,” and “cheerful” art extolled in the
aphorisms and lyrics of The Gay Science, and the manic, ferocious, high-strung art of “strong
affects” that Nietzsche calls for in Twilight of the Idols—even though both seem equally “lifeaffirming” and “creative.” While The Gay Science praises a “divinely artificial” art that “like a
pure flame, licks into unclouded skies” (an art of morning or daybreak, we might say using
Nietzsche’s imagery), Twilight of the Idols seems to indicate its author’s preference for
something in a much more earthbound register (an art of twilight or dusk):
If there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is
indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole
machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the
strength to accomplish this; above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient
and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong
affects; the frenzy of feats, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the
frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction; the frenzy under certain meteorological
influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and
finally the frenzy of overcharged and swollen will. (TI, IX, 8).
So which one does Nietzsche want: art that is light, cheerful, and ethereal, or art that is
convulsive, vehement, and intensely embodied? A “divinely untroubled” art which floats
weightlessly above the dirty material details of human existence on earth? Or an art of “frenzy”
(Rausch), full of “overcharged and swollen will”? A gay art, or a zany one? Nietzsche’s
hesitation here, which becomes all the more conspicuous given his insistence on the importance
of philosophizing from the right affects and values, may have something to do with a paradox
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specific to the zany (and the principle of frenzy that underwrites it). For there is something
strangely impotent about the zany, for all its vigor, ferocity, and “swollen will.” Though violent
in ways that would seem to promise catharsis, zaniness more often involves a state of sweaty
panting frantic movement without any clear end or direction, much less any culmination in
affective release. As dramatized by the flailing woman’s struggle with the tulle in Three
Seascapes, zaniness is a state of spinning one’s wheels: a mode of exertion that doesn’t seem to
really get the performer anywhere other than where he or she already is. In fact, zaniness often
seems to be an aesthetic of housewrecking: whether as the “housewrecking of language,” as
Peter Brooks describes Flaubert’s intention in writing Bouvard and Pécuchet,24 or the wrecking
of an actual house, as repeatedly done by the two zanies in the novel themselves.
The zany’s defining paradox is thus that it can seem un-fun precisely due to its aggressive
insistence on fun. This is the contradiction brilliantly captured by the title of Forced
Entertainment, a performance group from the ex-industrial city of Sheffield, U.K, whose
Happening-influenced theatrical productions since the mid 1980s to the present, from Pleasure
to Club of No Regrets, have been almost textbook examples of this style (Fig. 7a-b). Take, for
instance, this description of Bloody Mess from the group’s website (2004): “A pair of clowns in
smeared make-up start an ugly fight that threatens to take over the stage. A delinquent
cheerleader dances and yells… Rock-gig roadies creep across the stage—bringing disco lights,
new speakers and a microphone that no one really wants. A woman in a gorilla suit chucks
popcorn at anything that moves like a demented refugee from pantomime.”25 Note that no one in
the world of the performance wants the disco lights, speakers, and microphone; Forced
Entertainment’s act of getting its performers to drag these instruments of performance and/or
production on the stage—means for the production of fun—seems precisely to call attention to
their status as trash. It seems telling in this light that zaniness seems to always involve not just
the destruction of objects in general but the trashing of those designed for fun in particular: like
the merry-go-round in flames in the penultimate line of Ashbery’s Girls on the Run (“A carousel
is burning”), or the deliberately wrecked swimming pool and television sets in Vostell’s YouHappening.
Even the word “fun” is strangely not fun. Originally meaning a “cheat or trick; a hoax, a
practical joke” (noun), or “to make fun or sport” (verb), “fun” enters the English language in the
early 18th century as an action one involuntarily becomes an object of, or subjected to.26 It refers
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here not to one’s own feeling of enjoyment or pleasure, but to being the source of somebody
else’s. We thus find a primal social antagonism at the heart of fun. Even the contemporary
phrase “fun and games” is almost always used ironically, as the OED notes: as in “Mr. Brown
expects the fun and games of tax haven subsidiaries to disappear with the new legislation”
(Globe and Mail, 1970). More often designating explicitly punitive or military actions (the 1948
edition of Partridge Dictionary of Forces’ Slang defines it as “any brush with the enemy at
sea”),27 “fun and games” can also mean acts of terror, as evinced most starkly in the 1997 film
Funny Games (recently remade for the US in 2007), in which “Two psychotic young men take a
mother, father, and son hostage in their vacation cabin and force them to play sadistic ‘games’
with one another for their own amusement.”28
The zany screams fun—linking fun explicitly to negative affects ranging from
dissatisfaction to panic. Since subjective feelings of pleasure or displeasure lie at the heart of
every aesthetical relation, the affective contradiction that the zany embodies is one that goes
straight to the heart of philosophical aesthetics. This is especially the case for theories of the
aesthetic built around the concept of play, a prestigious concept particularly central to critiques
of art’s isolation from everyday life in modernity that have been made by philosophers as
different as Schiller and Nietzsche. The zany thus encodes a kind of meta-problem for aesthetic
theory—the paradox of unpleasurable pleasures, or pleasurable unpleasures—which is also
posed by The Gay Science, where for all its author’s visible effort, as Julian Young notes, “the
only kind of gaiety … achieved is a kind of manic frivolity which is really no more than a
symptom of desperation and despair.”29 This dissonance between zany tone and gay content
suggests a kind of affective dialectic. While gaiety is clearly the affect of the winners of history
with whom Nietzsche solicits his “rightful readers” to identify (which would then make zaniness
the affect of history’s losers),30 it seems like neither can really be thought of without the other in
Nietzsche. The zany, a style ostentatiously about playfulness or gaiety, is the affective style that
emerges precisely where an effort to be gay fails.31 Precisely because of his strenuous insistence
on gaiety, Young suggests, Nietzsche’s style runs against the promise of “Southern” happiness
reflected in its image of “la gaya scienza” of the Provençal troubadours. This failure to produce
the promised affect is all the more significant given how hard Nietzsche works in The Gay
Science to argue for the philosophical significance of philosophy’s moods, and for the
superiority of a joyful, playful philosophy in particular.
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Is Nietzsche’s call for a thinking joined to laughter (rather than deliberately severed from
feelings and values) doomed from the start by its imperative mood? (As in the case of the
command, Don’t think of a pink elephant.) Or is there a more specific cause behind this failure
that the zany affect of The Gay Science reflects? And could what keeps The Gay Science from
exemplifying the kind of philosophy Nietzsche so insistently calls for in The Gay Science, be in
any way related to what makes the zany itself so anxiously shrill? We can come at this same
problem from another angle by asking: What is the content that makes zany fall short of being
“lighthearted” in the radical sense in which Adorno suggests all art is, including those artworks
with an “expression of despair”?32 Precisely because the zany insists so strenuously on pleasure
and fun, the problem of what Adorno calls art’s “perpetually broken promises [of happiness]”
seem more intensely concentrated in this aesthetic than any other. It therefore seems worthwhile
to try to be as precise as possible about the reason for the zany’s failure to be joyful, or to make
others so. What’s eating the zany—why is it so stressed out? Why does it stress us out?
My argument in this chapter is that the zany always falls short of being lighthearted
because it is an aesthetic ultimately about work. If this argument seems surprising, or not
immediately obvious, it is because the zany continues to be predominantly associated in our
cultural imaginations with play. Yet I would argue that the zany is an aesthetic that speaks to the
relationship between work and play, as it has grown increasingly complex over the last few
centuries,33 from the strenuous pursuit of “Fun while Learning” by the retired Bouvard and
Pécuchet’s (in a novel which for all its comic ethos, has “nothing lighthearted about it,”
Raymond Queneau notes),34 to the ironically dogged efforts of American housewife Lucy
Ricardo to get into the entertainment industry on I Love Lucy (Fig. 8a-b), to the “raucous
corporate culture” of Southwest Airlines personified in the “oddball ways” of its current,
“colorful” CEO, Gary Kelley (Fig. 9).35 More specifically, zaniness speaks to a historically
specific erosion of the distinction between playing and working, under conditions in which, for
all this blurring of boundaries, work is increasingly subsumed by capital in a way that makes it
overwhelmingly experienced by people as the antithesis of pleasure and freedom.
To read the zany, in all its various appearances across the long durée of capitalist
development, as a style that not only encodes the affect of working subjects, but the putting-towork of affect and subjectivity itself (as we will see soon),36 is to read it as an aesthetic about
production—but precisely as this mode has come to increasingly include, in the late 20th century,
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activities previously classified as unproductive or reproductive. If zaniness is an aesthetic of
polyvalent doing, this is really because its content is labor, the human activity that when
socialized, abstracted, and made to create surplus value (i.e., unpaid labor), becomes formally
and really subsumed by capital as “productive.” This link to production is one of the main
reasons I’ve chosen to discuss the zany in conjunction with the cute, an aesthetic of and about
consumption, and the interesting, an aesthetic about circulation. It also goes a long way towards
explaining what at first seems to be another layer of paradox: that while the zany is an style
whose insistence on “fun” perversely turns it into the integument of un-fun; it is also a style that
points to the un-funness of fun in a way that millions of people over the centuries have obviously
found enjoyable. Make no mistake: the fact that the zany embodies the contradiction of forced
entertainment doesn’t seem to have precluded it from actually entertaining people. From the
Dada cabaret of Hugo Ball to the television comedy of Lucille Ball, and indeed since its origins
in 16th century commedia dell’arte, the zany has always been a popular style, even when adopted
by the avant-garde. Regarding zaniness as an aesthetic about production—about work that is
harnessed to become productive—thus helps explain its popularity, and also helps clarify some
of the things that distinguish it from other styles which have enjoyed just as much longevity in
modern culture.
While most of our aesthetic experiences, from that of the cute all the way to the sublime,
turn in various ways on the thinginess of things, our experience of the zany is almost always that
of a person.37 This particularly fundamental aspect of the aesthetic—its special connection to real
or imaginary personhood— is reflected in our use of “zany” as a judgment or speech act. We
refer to a “cute” mug, dog, or baby but never to that aforesaid mug, dog, or baby as “a cute.”
There is, analogously, no such thing as “an elegant,” “a gaudy,” “a majestic” or “a handsome.”
But in addition to being an adjective designating a characteristic or quality of persons in general,
“zany” is still used refer to an individual and specific person, a zany, as in Horace Walpole’s
description of Boswell’s The journal of a tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (1785) as
the “story of a mountebank and his zany.”38 Excessively abounding in affect and charisma, the
zany is a “character,” as we have noted. But as reflected in Walpole’s comment, the zany also
has a special relationship to the formal concept of character—that is, to the representation of
agents—that other aesthetic categories lack. (The sublime, for instance, has nothing in particular
to do with characters; nor does the interesting, for all its close ties to the history of the novel.)
12
One historical reason for why the zany bears this special tie to character will be made obvious
below—as will the reason for why it has a special relationship to polyvalent doing, performing
bodies, and above all, work.
This Zanni Which is Not One
When compared to the elliptical, even counterintuitive genealogies of cute and interesting (with
cute deriving from “acute,” and the aesthetic category of interesting having to sever itself from
Kantian “disinterestedness”),39 the genealogy of the zany is remarkably straightforward. Rooted
in the live performing arts and nascent capitalist culture of early modern Europe, zaniness begins
in the character of the zanni from the commedia dell’arte, the improvisational, actor-driven,
professional theatre of 16th century Italy. The zanni was an itinerant servant, modeled after the
Bergamask peasants who emigrated from the hills near Milan to Venice in search of temporary
work during moments of agricultural crisis or war, and typically played by a single actor in the
company.40 The zany is thus first and foremost a fictional person of a specific historical type,
though eventually crossing over from the commedia diegesis, into the professional or arte world
of early modern European theatre (where “zany” eventually becomes a generic term for a comic
performer). Indeed, “zanni” is the Venetian pronunciation of “Gianni,” which by the 17th
century had become a general term for any “porter … from the mountain country of Bergamo.”41
Note here that the etymology of “zany” has surprisingly nothing to do with the psychological
category of “insanity,” as one might think given the similarity of the two words in English.
In many ways analogous to the arte actors, who were also itinerant and temporary
workers, traveling from court to court like the Provençal troubadours who become the mascots of
The Gay Science, the zanni was traditionally employed in the household of a vecchio such as
Pantalone, a bourgeois merchant and citizen about town, in the role of his temporary servant.
Due to a “confluence of theatrical/literary precedents … and actual social history,” the masterservant agon thus became the “historical, structural, and thematic core” of commedia dell’arte,
until the introduction of professional actresses around 1560, which led to a new emphasis on
romantic plots (as well as the introduction of female servant characters, called zagne).42 We find
this pairing of master and servant mirrored in a slightly different way when zany” gets imported
to England. In the oldest usage as a noun in English, from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth
13
century (after which “zany” becomes used almost exclusively an adjective), “zany” referred not
so much to a specific character in a play, than to a comic performer serving as an assistant to a
mountebank, or an itinerant salesman and public entertainer, who “imitates his master's acts in a
ludicrously awkward way.” Here, in a use that the Oxford English Dictionary describes as
“almost always contemptuous” (often connoting a “hanger-on, parasite”), “zany” refers to a
professional entertainer’s “pretend” servant, as opposed to a fictional servant played by a
professional entertainer (as in the commedia dell’arte). In both English and Italian early modern
public culture, however, “zany” points to a place where dramatic performance and service work
intersect.
But back now to the commedia dell’arte, where zany-ness begins as the affective style of
a specific type of person (rural immigrant) defined by a specific kind of work: personal services,
provided in the household on a short-term and temporary basis, for an emerging merchant class.
This social division of labor, so fundamental to the story of the plays, was mirrored also at the
level of structure. For as Robert Henke notes, the task of making the stories of the plays move to
their conclusions was delegated specifically to the zanni, who plots ways to repair the social rifts
caused by his master’s inappropriate pursuit of a younger woman. Zanni thus performs his
assigned task in the drama at two levels: (1) serving his master by diligently cleaning up his
messes, with acts of dissimulation, intrigue, and social maneuvering that, (2), in “redress[ing] the
vecchio’s unfair power over the inamoratas,” “serve” the formal and ideological demands of the
genre as a whole. Indeed, as Henke notes, “this plotting zanni sometimes appears as if he is
directing the entire play” (22). Zanni is thus a fictional character who, in order to fulfill his
diegetic role (diplomacy), ends up doing work similar in character to that the professional
performers playing him, who often also served as diplomats for the courts that temporarily
employed them. With the northern court system “held together by a delicate network of
diplomatic and matrimonial alliances,” Henke notes, “some cross-courtly negotiations were
actually assisted by visiting arte troupes.” It is this history of affective or relational work on the
part of the zanni/performer, both on stage and in real life, which contemporary commedia
director Antonio Fava seems to want to acknowledge in his specific recommendation for the way
in which the zanni should be played: “Zanni, though ragged and blundering, is not a mendicant
or freeloader; he is a worker in search of a job. Though he creates disasters, he does not do so
maliciously but rather with the best of intentions of a proud and honest worker.”43
14
Fava seems to feel a need to stress the real and serious qualities of the activity of this
comic performer. Real, due to the intangibility of the end products of the zanni’s relational labor
(social relationships); serious, in spite of the association of zanni with, well, zaniness—the
boisterous and unruly behavior which we now associate primarily with shirking, not working.
Linking zaniness exactly to the rebellious play of the “mendicant or freeloader,” whom Fava
contrasts to the “honest worker” above, this far more common contemporary connotation can
actually be traced back to yet another division of labor in the commedia dell’arte character
system. As Henke notes, “All of Scala’s scenarios have one additional male servant, which
introduces a dramaturgical distinction at this status level. The so-called secondo zanni [most
famously represented by the character Arlecchino] contrasts Scala’s Pedrolino, or primo zanni,
by performing as a verbal and gestural virtuoso in directions that need bear no relationship to
the primary or supplementary plots” (23). In a thematic echo of the “structural tension between
the linear, well-constructed plot based on a literary model and the centrifugal improvisations of
the stand-up performer” so crucial to the commedia dell’arte’s semi-scripted, semi-extemporized
form (as a genre developing exactly at the crossroads of orality and literacy, Henke argues), it is,
ironically, the second zany who seems to have become more famous over the centuries,
ultimately stealing the spotlight from the first in the popular imagination. Unlike the conniving
and scheming primo zanni, the secondo is a “potentially anarchic improviser … who could
become a potential obstacle to the very plots his primo zanni colleague was attempting to
promote” (23). And all the more so since this zanni was typically a virtuosic “[master] of verbal
dilation … [with a] penchant for occult and pseudo-erudite knowledge[s]” (27).
Such “polymath wizardry” is best exemplified, Henke shows us, in “La dottrina del
Zanni,” a popular “zanni poem” first published in 1587. If a character is a category that “collects
all examples of itself” across differing historical periods, texts and media, as Aaron Kunin has
argued,44 the zany has seemed to do this more than any other commedia dell’arte character,
generating numerous spin-offs in other genres (zanni songs, zanni stories, zanni poems, and so
forth). “La dottrina” tells the story of a zanni’s journey from the Bergamo hills to Venice,
where, after first feeling awed by the diversity of the crowds, he immediately sets about learning
a wide range of practical and liberal arts: pharmacology, grammar, music, poetry, philosophy,
natural science, and astrology.45 This ability to speedily master specialized bodies of knowledge
(spurious, legitimate, scientific, and occult alike) clearly underlies the spontaneous displays of
15
erudition associated with the secondo zanni. It is also a tradition directly continued in the
performances of his 19th and 20th century descendants: from Bouvard and Pécuchet’s short-lived
but always passionate plunges into agronomy, fruit-farming, beer-making, landscape gardening,
anatomy, geology, aesthetics, archaeology, history, childrearing, adult education, and so on; to
postwar American housewife Lucy Ricardo’s reckless forays into fashion retail, television
marketing, salad dressing manufacturing and distribution, saxophone, ballet, charm school,
French, and so on. We see the same mania for “occult and pseudo-erudite knowledge” (and the
same travestying of the concept of the “Renaissance man”) in the character of Old Gregg from
the British TV comedy series The Mighty Boosh (Fig. 10a-e; see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcNHoOaoNhU). A relatively new character who has already
begun “collecting examples” of himself (see the pictures of people dressed as Old Gregg for
Halloween below), Old Gregg is a needy, vaguely racialized and quite explicitly feminized zany,
clad in a pink tutu, who kidnaps and holds people captive in his underwater cave for what seems
like the sole purpose of displaying his skills at painting, singing, dancing, and promoting
Bailey’s Irish Cream.46 As he plaintively yet aggressively asks his captive audience, “Do you
love me?”, Old Gregg might thus strike some of us as a particularly disquieting allegory for a
teacher of increasingly esoteric or de-valued skills, like an 18th century fencing teacher, or
dancing master, finding himself suddenly desperate for pupils by the first decades of the
industrialized 19th century.47
Commedia dell’arte thus presents two distinct ways of being zany that roughly
correspond to the two models of performing advocated by Oldenburg and Kaprow: the “honest
worker” approach of the primo zanni, with his dutiful plotting and diplomatic maneuvering; and
the “anarchic improvis[ations]” of the secondo zanni, an “anti-mimetic performer”
characteristically underrepresented in the written scenarios, Fava tells us, because he played such
a relatively unimportant role in the plot. Unlike his hardworking, constantly striving counterpart,
who is “permanently active in a game of construction and deconstruction of relationships … [and
in] small, medium, and large acts of survival” (Fava, 112), the second zany is “fundamentally
lazy, and given to fantasies such as the myth of Cuccagna, a utopian land where one is paid for
sleeping and punished for working” (Henke, 23). At first glance this quality would seem
contradict the secondo zanni’s lust for learning. Yet the pursuit of new skills and knowledges for
this zany obviously lies somewhere between work and play, as it seems to do similarly for
16
Bouvard and Pécuchet, Lucy Ricardo, and Old Gregg. The implications of this eroding
distinction between labor and leisure for the meaning of “performance” in general will be our
focus as we turn specifically to zaniness in the late 20th century.
Late Twentieth-Century Zanies: The Cable Guy, the Maniac, the Housewife, the Toy
Pace Fava, there are contexts in which being an “honest worker” and an “anarchic improviser”
are utterly compatible. Theatrical performing is the most obvious one, if always in the case of
some genres more than others (not rigorously disciplined stage traditions such as, say, kabuki,
but certainly théatre panique, walkabouts, and of course, commedia dell’arte). In modern
society more broadly, and in the late 20th century specifically, we also see these two modes of
doing converge in the rising dominance of a mode of working that the Italian autonomists call
“immaterial labor,” a concept that umbrellas both the affective labor of the primo zanni (activity
in which the end product is a social relationship), and the virtuosic linguistic performances of the
secondo zanni (activity in which the end product is “not separable from the act of producing”).48
While zaniness is thus about work from the very beginning, in the late 20th century the aesthetic
comes to encode a much more specific mode of working—one that recognizes no boundary
between the two distinct ways of being zany discussed above—which, building on the concept of
immaterial labor but also departing from it slightly (for reasons which will be clear), I’ll be
referring to as post-Fordist performance. I’ve chosen “performance” precisely because it already
refers to the public display of a skill or codified pattern of behavior, in both a cultural domain of
play (theatrical performance) and in an economic domain of labor (job or workplace
performance).49 In either context, “performance” always means two things: any self-consciously
repeated action, on the one hand; on the other, action specifically held up for evaluation against
some standard of achievement (as in the performance of a student, an athlete, or even a car).50
Both of these definitions (self-consciously quoted behavior; explicitly compared or evaluated
behavior) apply equally as well to the two contexts whose convergence I’ll be arguing late 20th
zaniness indexes: performing as entertainment and performing as work.
We’ve already met a housewife aspiring to becoming a professional entertainer (Lucy
Ricardo from I Love Lucy) and a dancer/singer/watercolorist (Old Gregg from The Mighty
Boosh), whose slightly desperate zeal for performing illustrates this convergence. These two
17
unemployed characters will show up again shortly. Our central guide to post-Fordist zaniness in
this section, however, will be the eponymous cable guy from the film The Cable Guy (Columbia
Pictures, 1996): a roving provider of a household service, if not exactly a household servant, who
harks directly back to the itinerant zanni of 16th century commedia dell’arte (Fig.11). Played by
comic Jim Carrey in one of his most virtuosic performances, the character is one whose real
name in the film is never finally disclosed. I will therefore be referring to him as, simply, the
cable guy.
The job of this late 20th century zany is to get his customers “connected,” or hooked up to
a technology that they will not need to understand in order to use. This makes the cable guy fall
into the category of what Anthony Giddens calls an “access point:” a possessor of specialized
knowledge mediating the relationships of his or her lay clients to modernity’s “abstract
systems.”51 Since modernity for Giddens is defined precisely by the fact that “no one can
completely opt out” of these systems (which are large and impersonal, and do not “answer
back”), he describes encounters at access points as “peculiarly consequential,” since it is here
that trust in these systems, the emotion on which modern social exchange most depends, is
produced via the worker’s public display of friendly reassurance. Workers at access points are
thus basically frontstage service providers who perform “emotional work,” described by Arlie
Russell Hochschild in her now classic study of Delta flight attendants, The Managed Heart:
Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), as the production of real affect by “deep acting”
(Stanislavski).52 By way of these performances, regularized encounters with the representatives
of abstract systems can thus “easily take on characteristics of trustworthiness associated with
friendship and intimacy” (Giddens, 85-86). But because these encounters are transitory and
irregular, Giddens is quick to note that “real friendship” at access points is by no means the
norm—which is exactly why the worker’s emotional work becomes so “peculiarly
consequential.” For modernity’s access points are not only “points of connection … at which
trust can be maintained or built up,” but also sites of epistemological tension (and presumably
social tension, also) between those who embody lay skepticism and professional expertise. As
such, Giddens notes, they can also become “places of vulnerability” for abstract systems:
“Although everyone is aware that the real repository of trust is in the abstract system, rather than
the individuals who in specific contexts ‘represent’ it, access points carry a reminder that it is
flesh-and-blood people (who are potentially fallible) who are its operators” (88). Since “bad
18
experiences at access points may lead either to a sort of resigned cynicism or, where this is
possible, to disengagement from the system altogether” (90-91), the “demeanor” of the access
point worker becomes especially important: “The grave deliberations of the judge, solemn
professionalism of the doctor, or stereotyped cheerfulness of the air cabin crew all fall into this
category. It is understood by all parties that reassurance is called for, and reassurance of a
double sort: in the reliability of the specific individuals involved and in the (necessarily arcane)
knowledge or skills to which the lay individual has no effective access” (114).
Each of the occupational demeanors cited here53 depends on a careful affective balancing
act. For while the “facework commitments which tie lay actors into trust relations [at access
points]” involve demonstrations of trustworthiness explicitly associated with friendship, these
performances need to simultaneously convey “an attitude of ‘business as usual,’ or
unflappability” (86). Access point workers must therefore strike a fine equilibrium between
intimacy and detachment. For as Giddens notes alluding to Erving Goffman, it is not a focused
personal attention, but rather a diffuse “civil inattention” that is the “fundamental aspect of trust
relations in the large-scale, anonymous settings of modernity” (88). Goffman’s concept of civil
inattention, a deliberate withdrawal of one’s attention to strangers in public spaces, is itself
derived from Georg Simmel’s analysis of “reserve” in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903),
as the “social form” used to manage anxiety caused by people’s proximity to one another in
cities.54 Civil inattention and reserve are thus affective demeanors no less deliberately put on, or
worked up, as the access-point worker’s display of friendliness.
In a comedy that tracks the consequences of a late-capitalist service provider who takes
the simulation of intimacy expected at access points far too literally, making increasingly
aggressive efforts to really be his client’s friend,55 zaniness in The Cable Guy encodes this
dialectic between intimacy and detachment as it pertains to his specific kind of labor. Everything
in the film rests on the conceit of the service worker lacking “reserve,” and of his constantly
violating the principle of distance that underlies it; an obtrusiveness evinced in the very first
interaction between the cable guy and his client, corporate real estate developer Steven (Matthew
Broderick. After installing Steven’s cable with flair, the cable guy offers to educate him about
“how this whole thing works” by taking his new “preferred customer” to see the Cable
Company’s satellite dish. Steven politely says, “Sure, we should do that someday,” thinking this
19
will be the end of it. “How about tomorrow?” brightly shoots back the cable guy, almost before
Steven has finished his sentence.
The cable guy is zany not just because he does relational work, but because he can’t seem
to stop doing it—even when off the clock. As with the emotional performances of the Delta
flight attendants interviewed by Hochschild, who described their difficulties “coming down”
from their deep acting when their shifts would end, the emotional work which the access-point
worker is normally supposed to perform—the work of producing affects like conviviality,
reassurance, and trust—spills over into the cable guy’s “idle time” and becomes difficult to
distinguish from his leisure. Like the “fearful, hungry, cunning” zanni confronted with the task
of repairing his employer’s damaged relationships, the cable guy’s affective work is temporally
as well as spatially unbounded, and thus difficult to quantify or factor into what Marx called
“socially necessary labor time.” What makes the cable guy so maniacal is that this work is also
free: not financially compensated, as well willingly given. His activity is thus strikingly similar
to informal caring work in the household (which as economists have noted is intrinsically
difficult to measure, even by the most sophisticated time-based studies); and like the willingly
donated and unpaid labor Tiziana Terranova describes as a structural necessity for today’s digital
economy and for the creation of value on the Internet in particular.56 For purely voluntarily,
after his official “job” of getting Steven plugged into the cable network is complete, the zany
cable guy, like a living version of Facebook, provides his client with the bonus service of social
networking, devising machinations to keep Steven, recently jilted by his fiancé, linked to a
friends and family and thus from sliding into an alienated and despondent stupor in front of his
TV.
The cable guy thus plots, schemes, and hustles like any good primo zanni on behalf of his
vecchio, in an unremitting effort to rebuild or repair Steven’s relationships to others: coaxing
Steven to go out, throwing a party for him at his house, arranging for him to have sex with a
prostitute (as part of an larger plan to help Steven reunite with his estranged fiancé, by managing
his sexual frustration), and getting him and his fiancé together at a family dinner at the home of
Steven’s parents. Always located in a gray area between play and work, the ambiguous status of
these socializing acts on Steven’s behalf comes across most in the film’s four famous scenes of
“fun. Each is a striking combination of competition, chance, mimicry, and vertigo (Roger
Callois’s four categories of play) that also models a particular “play-form of association”
20
(Simmel’s definition of “sociability”).57 First, a casual basketball game with Steven’s
coworkers—in which the cable guy, the only man to arrive dressed in full uniform, or what looks
like a basketball costume, ruins by “overplaying” or competing in far too enthusiastically, using
another player’s back to make a slam dunk that shatters the headboard (Fig. 12). Second, a mock
joust at a fantasy theme restaurant called Medieval Times—in which the cable guy, now literally
costumed in chain mail and whirling a mace, once again participates in a little too fervently for
Steven’s comfort (Fig. 13). Third, a Karaoke party—where, clad in fringed leather and other
bohemian accoutrements, the cable guy provides Steven with seduction music for his encounter
with a sex worker (whom the cable guy has hired to sleep with Steven without his knowledge),
by giving a savagely spectacular performance of Jefferson Airplane’s 1970s psychedelic-folk hit,
“Don’t You Want Somebody to Love,” in an adjoining room (Fig. 14). Finally, a game of
“Porno Password” after the family dinner in the living room of Steven’s parents—where to
Steven’s agitation, the cable guy proves himself particularly virtuosic at this game of verbal
improvisation—that is, especially skilled at using clues to draw out pornographic words from his
partner—when that partner is Steven’s fiancé (Fig. 15).
The cable guy is thus “permanently active in a game of construction and deconstruction
of relationships” mediated specifically through the concept of fun. Note too that this zany
performer’s passionate commitment to his job entails that he take on multiple temporary roles. It
is precisely his particular (if also generic) role as a service provider, in other words, that compels
him to adopt the guise of a basketball player, a medieval knight, a rock singer, and party guest.
This is similar to the way in Pryor’s character, Jack Brown, hired as a “toy” on the whim of a
child by a wealthy household, also ends up playing the extra roles of nanny, tutor, coach, family
therapist, and newspaper editor. Similarly, over the television show’s original running period of
six years, viewers of I Love Lucy saw its zany star, Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) assume over a
hundred “temporary” or “extra” roles as part of her overarching one as a housewife desperately
trying to get into the entertainment industry: masseur, boutique saleslady, magician’s assistant,
salad dressing distributor, saxophone player, assembly line worker, publicity stunt actor. Linked
as they are in each case to fun and games, we can read the very multiplicity of these “extra”
roles—roles from which the cable guy, toy, and housewife all seem to play too well—as an index
of what Alan Liu calls the “postindustrial repositioning of leisure within work,”58 or what Jon
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McKenzie describes in Perform Or Else as the convergence of cultural performance with
occupational and technological performance in the postwar U.S.59
This convergence is in many ways specific, as McKenzie and Liu argue, to the postFordist turn of advanced capitalist nations in response to the economic crises of the early 1970s
(in conjunction with the overall retreat from Keynesian planning during the same period). It is
also one that Nietzsche seems to anticipate in The Gay Science under the rubric of what he calls
“role faith—an artist’s faith if you will.” This is the main subject of his aphorism How things
will become ever more ‘artistic’ in Europe, one of the rare moments in his writings in which
Nietzsche talks explicitly about working people (303). “Even today, in our time of transition
when so many factors cease to compel men, the care to make a living still compels almost all
male Europeans to adopt a particular role, their so-called occupation. A few retain the freedom,
a merely apparent freedom, to choose this role for themselves; for most men it is chosen” (302).
As Nietzsche continues, “The result is rather strange. As they attain a more advanced age,
almost all Europeans confound themselves with their role; they become the victims of their own
‘good performance’; they themselves have forgotten how much accidents, moods, caprice
disposed of them when the question of their ‘vocation’ was decided—and how many other roles
they might perhaps have been able to play; for now it is too late. Considered more deeply, the
role has actually become character; and art, nature (302). Though Nietzsche praises role-playing
effusively elsewhere for precisely its relation to caprice, here Nietzsche focuses on it as a
principle of normativity, rather than artistic freedom. Role faith and role play in The Gay
Science are thus two sides of the same coin: one on the side of “reactive forces,” the other, on the
side of the “active.” Or to exchange Nietzsche’s terms for our own: one on the side of “zany”
aesthetics (role faith), the other on the side of the gay (role play).
Yet for all his sardonic commentary, Nietzsche’s take on role faith is more equivocal than
it would at first seem. In contrast to the way in which men in the Middle Ages viewed
themselves as predestined for their occupations with a “piety” that led to the erection of
protective institutions (classes, guilds, and hereditary trade privileges), Nietzsche sees role faith
as part of the modern rise of a certain “cocky faith and opposite point of view,” one embracing
the element of “accident, role and caprice” that the older belief in one’s predestination for a
singular occupation could not acknowledge: “The individual becomes convinced that he can do
just about everything and can manage almost every role, and everybody experiments with
22
himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and
becomes art” (303). This pleasure-filled, playful, and improvisational approach to life would
seem to be something on which the author of The Gay Science could only look approvingly,
given his overall attitudes toward art, pleasure, and experimentation. With the widespread
acceptance of role faith, however, which he describes as a distinctively “American,” i.e.,
advanced capitalist phenomenon spreading like a “disease” in Europe, another important
metamorphosis takes place which Nietzsche notes “does not merit imitation in all respects”:
“Whenever a human being begins to discover how he is playing a role and how he can become a
actor, he becomes an actor” (303). As this universal lack of distance gives rise to an “entire
society” of actors, Nietzsche notes, “another human type is disadvantaged more and more and
finally made impossible; above all, the great architects. The strength to build becomes
paralyzed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged; those with
a genius for organization become scarce.” Role faith thus leads straight to the dissolution of the
state, as precisely that which erects institutions in acts of long-term planning. It is hard to tell if
this is finally something Nietzsche, hardly a fan of institutions (or for that matter, of
architecture), wants to praise or condemn. Thus, while the rise of role faith is a development
Nietzsche explicitly states he “fears,” it is also one which clearly fascinates him, much in the
same way, as Gilles Deleuze notes, he finds something “admirable and dangerous” in all the
reactive forces he can’t seem to stop writing about: “It is thus that the maddest and most
interesting ages of history always emerge, when the ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, become the real
masters” (303).60
Role faith is thus another term for what makes the cable guy, like the toy and the
housewife, so zany. In a way that underscores the economically ambiguous status of his
“services” in the film overall—especially when in one of the final moments of the film, it is
disclosed that the cable guy was never employed—each of the film’s four main comic scenes
shows this worker/performer excessively immersed in, or not “alienated” enough from his “role”
(in the Brechtian, positive sense of alienation). This zany is unable to distinguish play from nonplay, thus playing “deep” when he should have been playing shallow. The film’s central image
of a performer who cannot stop performing thus unites the two ways of being zany that the
commedia dell’arte held apart: the diligent repairer of social relations (the cable guy as Steven’s
overly devoted “friend”), and the virtuoso mimic (the cable guy as overly enthusiastic basketball
23
player, jouster, singer, and so on). And this reunification of the two ways of being zany takes
place simultaneously on a dramaturgical level as well, with the diligent repairer of social
relations represented by a fictional character (cable guy), and the virtuoso mimic by the actor
who plays him: the elastic-faced, rubber-bodied, Jim Carrey. In a striking reversal of the
Stanislavskian method by which actors “become” by performing their fictional characters, the
zany performances which transform the cable guy into Jim Carrey, via the fictional character’s
own mediating impersonations of a basketball player, medieval knight, psychedelic rocker, and
party guest, points to a commonality between the labors of both character and actor, and to
zaniness itself as the affective style of a particular mode of production in which two kinds of
performing (service work and virtuosic mimicry) converge.
The cable guy is thus less interesting as an example of a specific class of worker (mental
versus manual, blue versus white or pink collar), than that of a relationship to work in general
increasingly pervasive across class divides. (This is especially the case given that the film shows
how surprisingly alike Steven’s job and the cable guy’s job finally are, how much they rely on
the same set of socializing skills.) It is this relationship to work in general that the Italian new
left sought to capture in the concept of immaterial labor. For as Maurizio Lazzarato notes, the
concept refers not only to cultural and symbolic activities “that are not normally recognized as
‘work,’” such as “activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards,
fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and … public opinion,” but more importantly also to
restructured labor practices in large-scale industry and services, which have increasingly called
for skills in communication and social cooperation after the Fordist/Taylorist crisis of the
1970s.61 The general shift in managerial emphasis in this period “from controlling workers to
empowering them, from giving orders to creating participatory interactions” is a fundamentally
ambiguous development, however.62 For while there are certainly progressive elements in the
displacement (if not complete replacement) of scientific or Taylorist management by what
McKenzie calls “Performance Management,” the new mandate that workers “become subjects of
communication,” as Lazzarato puts it, “threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier
rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because [it] seeks to
involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value” (136).
Lazzarato’s point is not that the distinction between factory work and cultural work, or the new
social hierarchies opened up by its increasing reorganization along a South/North axis, no longer
24
pertain today. It is rather that labor in general around the globe is increasingly marked by a
tendency which was first made especially conspicuous in the culture industries: namely, the
“putting to work” of social or relational skills, ordinary know-how, affects, and other human
capacities which until recently seemed free from subsumption by capital. Thus, while it is in the
more “classic” domain of immaterial labor that it becomes “increasingly difficult to distinguish
leisure time from work time” (as evinced particularly in the free production of “chat, real-life
stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters” and other culture for the Internet, as Terranova notes),
the characteristics of this labor now inform working processes in factories and big companies as
well, which have come to explicitly encourage innovation in the techniques and procedures of
communication, in the production of the social conditions that make it possible (cooperation),63
and the management of social relationships in general (137). In tandem with other post-Fordist
tendencies such as the shift to small batch production, continuous re-skilling, and the rise of
practices like homework and supplementing, this putting-to-work of cooperation and subjectivity
has produced an irreversible destabilization of the boundary between labor and intellect, work
and nonwork. “Life becomes inseparable from work,” as Lazzarato puts it bluntly.
In redefining work as the “capacity to activate and manage productive cooperation,”
moreover, labor in large-scale industry and services now does something else that the “classic”
form of immaterial labor in the culture industries has always done: it produces “first and
foremost a ‘social relationship’ (a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption).”
For as evinced particularly in “audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, [and] the production
of software,” immaterial labor produces a commodity which is “not destroyed in the act of
consumption, but rather … enlarges, transforms, and creates the ‘ideological’ and cultural
environment of the consumer,” in a way that then makes her own practices of consumption
productive in turn (of new needs, images, and tastes). This integration of production and
consumption, such that “the consumer intervenes in an active way in the composition of the
product,” is particularly crucial for on the valorization of value on the Internet, as Terranova
notes, where “knowledgeable consumption” is translated most conspicuously into “productive
activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time shamelessly exploited.”64 Here
“surplus value is no longer extracted [exclusively] from labor materialized in a product,” as
Sylvère Lotringer argues, but rather “results in the discrepancy between paid and unpaid work—
the idle time of the mind that keeps enriching, unacknowledged, the fruits of immaterial labor.”
25
Given immaterial labor’s creative and social aspects, its valorization of subjectivity and
communication, and its structural reliance on free or voluntarily donated labor (a point
emphasized in particular by Terranova and Lotringer), it may come as no surprise that Lazzarato
ultimately privileges an “aesthetic model [of production]” for his fullest explanation of its
specificity. (He might have gotten even more mileage from his analogy by appealing directly to
the lively arts, given the particular centrality of collaboration and communication to theatre and
dance, in which affectively embodied subjectivity also functions in a much more explicit way as
“raw material” than in the plastic or discursive arts). As Lazzarato notes, the analogy to artistic
production’s categories of author, reproduction, and reception “reveals aspects that the
traditional economic categories tend to obscure and that … constitute the ‘specific differences’
of the post-Taylorist means of production” (144). First, since immaterial labor “results from a
unique synthesis of different types of know-how: intellectual skills, manual skills, and
entrepreneurial skills,” it has a certain “autonomy” similar to the labor of the self-employed
artist; second, immaterial labor produces “ideological products” which “are always addressed to
someone … are ideally ‘signifying,’ and thus … pose the problem of ‘meaning’”; third, “by
means of the reception that gives the product ‘a place in life’ (in other words, integrates it into
social communication) and allows it [to] evolve,” immaterial labor turns the general public or
audience into a producer. Here consumption becomes a “creative act” and an “integrative part of
the product.” In the last and most important stage of this production cycle, immaterial labor
draws from “the ‘values’ that the public “produces” in its creative consumption of these
ideological products, in order to innovate and renew consumption. The “modes of being, modes
of existing, and forms of life” that support these values thus become a direct source of
innovation.65 Though not specifically mentioned by Lazzarato here, immaterial labor by this
definition thus includes affective and “biopolitical” labor, as a process that extracts value from
“modes of being, modes of existing, and forms of life.”
If late-capitalist zaniness encodes immaterial labor, it thus encodes a late-capitalist mode
of production which is in some ways itself “aesthetic” (in Lazzarato’s sense of being understood
best through the analogy of artistic and cultural production). But as an aesthetic style linked to a
“mode of being” marked by the subsumption of subjectivity and sociability into the production
process, postindustrial zaniness itself can obviously be put to work to generate profits for capital.
We might think here of a recent commercial made by the Korean car company Kia which depicts
26
a male car salesman furiously dancing in a sexually provocative way, in a Kia showroom, to an
adulterated version of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” (Fig. 16a-q; see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOyQK5jBalE): “HE’S A MANIAC, MANIAC ON THE FLOOR /
AND HE’S SELLING LIKE HE’S NEVER SOLD BEFORE.”66
Both the music and the style of dancing
are references to Flashdance (Paramount Pictures, 1983), a film about a U.S. factory welder
(Jennifer Beals) aspiring to get out of the dying Pittsburgh steel industry by, well, dancing (Fig.
17). By thus deliberately conflating selling with dancing, job performance with artistic
performance, and the activity of a worker on the sales floor with that of a dancer and an actress
(through its allusion to both the character played by Beals, and to Beals herself), Kia’s ”Maniac”
uses the very image of the post-Fordist convergence of job performance with cultural
performance as its way of selling its product (and in a way that remarkably makes the long
unpopular image of the car salesman seem sympathetic and appealing). In a particularly potent
illustration of how immaterial labor enlists “even the worker’s personality and subjectivity
within the production of value (though note that the zany worker Kia chose to depict is a service
provider, rather than a producer on the assembly line), “Maniac” makes clear that zaniness itself
sells. “Maniac” is thus an allegory of both this “ideological product” (zaniness) and the “form of
life” (affective labor) that it encodes: like the zany performer it depicts, it sells/performs by
selling “selling” itself, qua high-affect or aesthetic performance.67
In The Cable Guy and “Maniac,” late-capitalist zaniness thus seems to be slightly more
than an aesthetic about the putting-to-work of affect and subjectivity. More reflexively, in these
texts, zaniness seems to be an aesthetic about its own being put to work, as an intensely affective
and subjective style. This would go a long way toward explaining why the zany, commercially
successful from the 16th century onward, continues to be so compelling to so many today:
because it speaks to the very conscription of our own affective acts of knowledgeable
consumption for the production of surplus value; because it speaks to a “form of life”
characterized precisely by the economic capture of subjectivity. This is the main thing that
distinguishes post-Fordist zaniness from the often racialized, specifically Tayloristic affect I have
described elsewhere as animatedness (though it is important to note that they often exist in
tandem, just as around the world, modes of Fordist production obviously continue to exist in
imbrication with post-Fordist ones, and aspects of scientific management alongside styles of
performance management). While animatedness encodes industrial capitalism’s objectifying
27
mechanization of the movements of the human body, zaniness involves the subjectification of
processes of production, and to their infusion with affect and personality; whereas the former
suggests impersonal and standardizing forces acting on a body from the outside, the latter points
to a body driven from within. While the problem animatedness poses is thus one of alienation
(the subject’s affect is estranged or separated from him), the problem of zaniness is one of not
enough alienation (that is, not enough separation). And finally, while animatedness evokes a
human being stripped of its subjectivity in the interests of performance efficiency (the modernist
image of human as puppet, automaton or robot) zaniness confronts us with what we might call
the crisis of the overproduction of subjectivity, of the production of a quantity of charisma and
personality that exceeds consumer demand (the postmodernist image of the cable guy, the
maniac, the housewife, the toy).
The problem of distance that afflicts the zany is not only a problem specific to postFordist labor, however. It is also an aesthetic problem which has emerged as such particularly in
late 20th century debates about the merits of aesthetic participation versus contemplation; debates
in which the concept of “play” happens also to feature prominently. Late 20th century zaniness,
precisely in being about a kind of work easily mistaken for nonwork (since its products are
affects and social relationships) thus offers us a new perspective on a very specific kind of art:
one specific to, and in many ways a unconscious reflection of, the culture of post-Fordist labor
analyzed by Lazzarato and Virno above. This is what I want to turn to in the following section.
The “Relational Art” of the Permanent Temp
Zaniness is performing that never stops. As if in a prevision of contemporary practices
like perpetual reskilling, company-mandated “lifelong learning,” and “edutainment,” Flaubert’s
zanies, who as Queneau notes “seldom laugh, and never ‘have fun,’” can’t stop pursuing new
areas of expertise.68 Lucy can’t stop taking on the extra, temporary, or sideline jobs she thinks
will help her get into show business. And most aggressively, in a way that calls to mind the
“theatrical” artwork Michael Fried compares to a “disquieting” person in “Art and Objecthood,”
the zany cable guy won’t or can’t leave Steven alone. Emphasizing the “obtrusiveness and,
often, even aggressiveness of literalist work,” which “demands that the beholder take it into
account, that he take it seriously,” Fried likens it to a person hovering in ambush who, when
28
finally encountering the beholder, “refuses, obstinately, to let him alone” (Fried, 155, 163). This
analogy makes the literalist artwork sound not just like any person, but more specifically like a
pushy salesman, a bothersome street mime, or as Grant Kester suggests, an over-solicitous
prostitute—all performers of affective labor in one way or another. Or as Kester suggests, taking
Fried’s analogy even further, a “garrulous co-worker who sidles up to you at the office New
Year’s party to bore you with snapshots of his children, ‘obstinately’ ignoring all your attempts
to politely signal lack of interest.”69
In a remarkably prescient way, Fried’s essay on minimalist sculpture in 1959 thus
anticipates the steady rise over the next few decades of an art expressly aimed at producing
relationships, dialogue, and social interaction. For Nicolas Bourriard, this work represents the
third stage in a history of western art told as the “history of the production of relations with the
world.” After exploring the relationships between humanity and deity, then between human
subjects and the physical world, art turns to “the sphere of inter-human relations.”70 Here the
late 20th century artist “sets his sights more and more clearly on the relations that his work will
create among his public, and on the invention of models of sociability.” As Bourriard continues:
This specific production determines not only an ideological and practical arena, but new
formal fields as well. By this, I mean that over and above the relational character intrinsic to
the artwork, the figures of reference to the sphere of human relations have now become fully
fledged artistic “forms.” Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration
between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all manner of
encounter and relational invention thus represent, today, aesthetic objects likely to be looked
at as such … a production of forms with something other than a simple aesthetic
consumption in mind. (28-9).
As Kester shows in Conversation Pieces, works that make form out of social relations (if with
“something other than a simple aesthetic consumption in mind”) have since the 1970s come in a
very wide range: from the conscientious efforts of John Latham’s Artist’s Placement Group
(APG) to “make artists part of government and private-sector decision-making processes” (by
organizing sit-downs between government officials, business leaders, activists, artists, and the
general public), to Adrian Piper’s much more anarchic Catalysis series, solo street-based
performances in which Piper, literalizing Fried’s metaphor for the literalist work by becoming a
living incarnation of his disquieting person, explored various ways of violating the public code
of civil inattention: riding in the subway with a towel stuffed in her mouth, reciting her
29
transcribed phone conversations to those passing by, playing belches from a concealed tape
player in a library.”71 Though ranging in tone from serious to zany, the common theme in this
genre of art is sociability, or the effort to invent new forms of sociability by putting pressure on
the old ones.
Arguing that the interest in communication and sociability already visible in the work of
artists in the 1970s, takes on a distinctive new twist in the art from the 1990s, Bourriaud
anatomizes such experiments in “relational form” using the following categories. First,
“connections and meetings”: art that arranges appointments and then “elapses within a given
time for an audience summoned by the artist.” Second, “conviviality and encounters”: as in the
work of Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, who make art by organizing parties or inviting
people to a gallery to make conversation over soup. Third, “collaborations and contracts”: as in
Wedding Piece, Alix Lambert’s agreement to marry and divorce four people in six months. And
lastly, “professional relation: clienteles”: where the artist “models a business or professional
activity by offering services.” While Bourriard’s main example is artist Christine Hill, who
offers shoe shines and massages to the general public, his category would also clearly includes
APG, or, to invoke a zanier precedent, chicken woman Linda Montano’s experiments at fusing
art with life from the mid 1970s onward, as in Becoming a Bell Ringer for the Salvation Army
(1974), Home Nursing (1973), Garage Talk (1974), Rose Mountain Walking Club (1975), and
Odd Jobs (1973).72
Pointing to this last category in particular, Bourriard argues that there is an inherently
ethical dimension to relational art: “Through little services rendered, the artists fill in the cracks
in the social bond.” Note that this über-service of repairing society seems to require that artists
take on multiple roles in their work, mirroring what Hal Foster has described as the artist’s
increasingly necessary doubling as curator, critic, and public relations agent in the age of today’s
global “mega-exhibitions.”73 In the same way Montano becomes a bell ringer, walking club
leader, garage therapist, and nurse, contemporary artist Gabriel Orozco describes himself as “the
host of a team, a coach, a producer, an organizer, a representative, a cheerleader, a host of the
party, a captain of the boat; in short, an activist, and activator, an incubator.”74 Though Orozco
defines his distinctive activity as an artist in this way with pride, his definition points to a more
general set of working conditions which also, as Marx stresses in the unpublished 6th chapter” of
Capital,75 produce capitalism’s ideally malleable and thus easily mobile worker. This is a
30
worker for whom all labor is made abstract and therefore homogeneous: the perpetual temp,
extra, or odd-jobber. In this sense the work of the relational artist reflects a relationship to work
increasingly held in common by all, including even the unemployed: from housewife Lucy
Ricardo’s intermittent stints as baker, salesman, saxophone player, and magician’s assistant, to
Jack Brown’s many various, shifting roles as the toy. All zanies, as Montano’s performances in
the 1970s seem to presciently grasp, seem to be permanent doers of Odd Jobs.
As The Cable Guy in particular demonstrates, by foregrounding the production of
“meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals,
and places of conviviality” as its zany performer’s special line of work (a relational work which
he seems available and even on call to perform at any time, and which he also performs free of
charge, with no benefits), the “fully fledged artistic forms” which social relationships assume in
the relational art of the 1990s are thus strikingly indistinguishable from forms of work in an
economy increasingly marked by the extraction of surplus value from sociability. Filling in “the
cracks in the social bond” (by “little services rendered”) thus seems disconcertingly like “filling
up the pores of the workday.”77 Bourriard notes this connection in passing, if without reflecting
on its significance or implications: “It is not haphazard if the graduate dematerialization of the
artwork throughout the 20th century, came with an upsurge of the work within the sphere of
work” (93). For Hal Foster, one implication is clear: that while to some viewers “‘relational
aesthetics’ will sound like a truly final end of art, to be celebrated or descried,” to others it will
seem to merely “aestheticize the nicer procedures of our service economy” (195). Whether done
consciously or unconsciously, relational art’s mimesis of the relations of production in the postFordist workplace (and of the hegemony of immaterial labor, in particular) thus puts an
unprecedented twist on a classic avant-garde project whose goal has long seemed impervious to
ethical or political questioning: the fusing of art with everyday life. What stance should the
committed artist adopt towards this principle when one sees it already realized—though not in
the manner originally envisioned—in the workplace, or on reality television? In encouraging
personal individuation and enrichment, the shift from scientific to performance management
further complicates aesthetic theories which have identified art’s distinctive function as the
production of productive subjectivity, or as Felix Guattari puts it, a subjectivity “forever selfenriching its relationship with the world.”78 All of this casts new uncertainty, Guillermo GómezPeña shrewdly notes, on the future of the performing artist, as the turn to personal expression and
31
playful experimentation in the market and workplace rises in tandem with a kind of ideologically
bad zaniness he calls the “mainstream bizarre”: a cultural style specific to a neoliberal,
multicultural age, in which performances of “extreme identity” have become routine (“Just
switch on Jerry Springer”).79 As a phenomenon closely imbricated with the rise of immaterial
labor (with its own “cultural” harnessing of affects, subjectivity, and forms of life), mainstream
bizarre thus forces the radical performer to restock and re-evaluate his or her mission, as we see
Gómez-Peña valiantly try to do in the writings and projects collected in Ethno-Techno. (He
arrives at the conclusion that he or she must simply keep at it, if in an altered, more collaborative
or pedagogical form.)
A similar question would seem to confront the relational artist, especially if what drives
his or her work is a commitment to an “ethics of the everyday.” How are we to feel about the
idea that art’s unique mission lies in the production of what Guattari calls “a surplus-value of
subjectivity,” when subjectivity itself is made into a producer of surplus value (80)? And what
is the proper stance to adopt toward the project of re-integrating art with everyday life—as called
for over centuries by critics of industrial modernity ranging from Schiller to Nietzsche to
Dewey—at a moment where everyday practices are increasingly valorized and incorporated into
the production process of capital? Having primarily celebrated the work it discusses, Relational
Aesthetics is noticeably silent on this issue, as also seem many of the artists it examines. But
without engaging this question, as Foster dryly notes, the relational art of the 1990s “seems to
risk a weird formalism of discursivity and sociability pursued for their own sakes. [A]rt
collectives in the recent past, such as those formed around AIDS activism, were political
projects; today simply getting together sometimes seems enough” (“Chat Rooms,” 192).
Yet relational art’s cheery optimism about its ability to get people together—its insistence
on “happy interactivity”—has to some seemed unconvincing, or strained. Foster himself
suggests as much:
Perhaps discursivity and sociability are in the foreground of art today because they are scarce
elsewhere. It is as though the very idea of community has taken on a utopian tinge. Even an
art audience cannot be taken for granted but must be conjured up every time, which might be
why contemporary exhibitions often feel like remedial work in socialization: come and play,
talk, learn with me. If participation appears threatened in other spheres, its privileging in art
might be compensatory—a pale, part-time substitute. (194)
32
Though this is a compelling argument, post-Fordist zaniness suggests a rather different reason
for why “discursivity and sociability are in the foreground of art today”: not because they are
scarce, but perhaps all too prevalent in other spheres (i.e. the office, the factory, the school, and
so on), harnessed for the production of surplus value everywhere. From this point of view,
relational art’s focus on participation seems less a desperate effort to compensate for the society
deficient in social and communicative skills Foster describes above, and more like a mimetic
reflection of one that is arguably just as equivocal: a society in which communication and social
cooperation are not so much vitiated or “threatened” by capital, than valorized by it. As
Bourriard himself puts it, in one of Relational Aesthetics’s rare moments of pessimism, “The
society of spectacle is thus followed by the society of extras, where everyone finds the illusion of
an interactive democracy in more or less truncated channels of communication” (26).80 This
would seem to be the basic difference between the “everyday” interventions of the 1990s, and
those of an earlier generation of Situationists.
Late 20th century zaniness, the aesthetic of a historically specific, predominantly affective
mode of production which we have been approaching as embodied in the disquieting,
loquacious, all-too sociable figure of the cable guy, thus points to an interesting chiasmus. While
advanced artists around the globe are “making work in the sphere of work” (providing services,
calling meetings, making appointments, developing clienteles, creating new forms of
collaboration, and improving communication), global firms and organizations are increasingly
pursing, as McKenzie notes, an “artistic approach to business”: explicitly encouraging “diversity,
innovation, and intuition” in workers rather than “uniformity, conformity, and rationality,”
privileging decentralized structures and flexible management styles explicitly based on Gregory
Bateson’s theory of “play” and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of “flow,” and by
emphasizing pleasure and personal expression on the part of workers now individually
empowered with information.81 If this new intimacy between art and business accelerates the
disintegration of the boundary between labor and leisure under the hegemony of immaterial
labor, it clearly also reflects the convergence between job and cultural performance analyzed by
McKenzie, which I have been arguing the late-capitalist zaniness encodes.
Our zany cable guy can thus also be taken as a figure for, or way of approaching the
specific set of problems posed by, the relational art of the 1990s (and also 1970s and 80s)—an
art explicitly designed to produce the kind of aesthetic experience Fried likens to the experience
33
of being confronted by a “disquieting person” in the late 1950s. But note that even if late 20th
century zaniness is about post-Fordist work, the fact that relational art typically assumes the
forms of post-Fordist work doesn’t necessarily make it zany. On the one hand, nothing could be
more in keeping with the zany’s unique way of mixing playfulness with social or physical
discomfort, than the laborious Maintenance Art performances of Mierle Ukeles, the disturbing
New York street crawls of William Pope.L., or the aggressively confrontational interactions with
the general public staged by La Compagnie Extrêmement Prétentieuse and Scharlatan Theater
(and usually in the guise of service providers and/or immaterial laborers: waiters, journalists, or
pram-pushing nannies). On the other hand, there is nothing particularly zany about the work of,
say, Rirkrit Tiravanija. For in contrast to Ukeles’s work, where it is precisely the presence of
labor, and of repetitive domestic or reproductive labor, in particular, that gives rise to this
specific temporality, as Helen Molesworth notes, Tiravanija’s “art of living” can seem to
promote a “fetishized notion of ‘the everyday’” by simply recreating and inhabiting domestic
spaces, as in his exact replication of his apartment interior for the art gallery.82 Politely inviting
the beholder’s participation, rather than aggressively or frantically soliciting it (as in case of the
cable guy or Piper’s Catalysis persona), and never showing signs of strain or desperation,
Tiravnaija’s easygoing approach to “everyday life” thus maintains (is in some ways about his
ability to maintain) a relaxed and comfortable attitude that zanies, who are not at all cool, lack.
So when explicitly about or assuming the form of immaterial labor, not all relational art is
zany. But what relational art underscores about the immaterial labor that contemporary zaniness
encodes, and in a way that is not especially emphasized in Lazzarato’s account of it, is how
fundamentally performative it is. Here Paolo Virno is a key thinker, having expanded the
aesthetic analogy used by Lazzarato to explain the increasing subsumption of affects,
subjectivity, and social relationships into the process of production, by describing immaterial
labor as “virtuosic,” by which he means that it has qualities similar to the “special capacities of
the performing artist.”83 Like the dance of a dancer, which “does not leave us with a defined
object distinguishable from the performance,” the activity of virtuosos is that which “finds its
own fulfillment or purpose in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product,” as well as
activity that essentially “requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an
audience.” (52). The category of the virtuoso thus includes “butlers” as well as “pianists …
dancers, teachers, orators, priests.” For as Virno argues, “Marx is disturbed by the strong
34
resemblance between the activity of the performing artist and the servile duties which, thankless
and frustrating as they are, [in his account] do not produce surplus value, and thus return to the
realm of non-productive labor” (54). Though he recognizes that virtuosic performances can
produce profit “if organized in a capitalistic fashion,” says Virno, in the end for Marx “one
cannot speak of productive (surplus-value) labor… where an autonomous finished product is
lacking.” Having “virtually accepted the equation work-without-end-product = personal
services,” and having excluding personal services—such as those of a butler or valet or paid
caregiver—as a source of surplus value, Marx arrives at a conclusion that reveals the limits of
some of his historical categories for the theorization of work in our contemporary moment:
“Virtuosic labor, for Marx, is a form of wage labor which is not, at the same time, productive
labor.” In the next section I’ll be examining one key implication of this definition of virtuosic
labor as unproductive—one that Virno does not discuss explicitly—for late-capitalist zaniness.
The Post-Fordist Zany’s Ambiguous Gender
Zaniness is an aesthetic of polyvalent doing (acting with or among the presence of others)
whose deepest content, I have been arguing, is labor. It is perhaps the one aesthetic category in
our contemporary repertoire explicitly about labor as “performing.” As Ukeles puts it in her
“Maintenance Art Manifesto” (1974), “MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK.” Let us therefore take
a moment to recap the main features of the contemporary relationship to labor that late 20th
century zaniness presumably encodes. What Lazzarato and Virno call immaterial/virtuosic labor
is not just discursive or symbolic, but affective labor. It is labor whose “raw material is
subjectivity,” or which utilizes this material to produce “new subjectivities” in turn. It is labor
that does not always immediately look like labor, since its products—subjectivity, affects, social
relationships—are characteristically “ephemeral” or “unmarked.” Linked to the continuous or
temporally unbounded rendering of personal services in the household, at times this labor does
not even seem to culminate in a truly objective end product, or one clearly distinguishable from
the subjective act of producing. Because immaterial/virtuosic labor is so intensely bound up
with “modes of being, modes of existing, and forms of life” (because is “biopolitical,” as
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say) it is activity that is not only difficult to objectify, but to
quantify. (Paradoxically, it is in this sense obdurately material, or resistant to the abstraction
35
involved in calculating “socially necessary labor.”) As productive activity that cannot easily be
dichotomized into play or work, it is thus concomitant with a social order in which it becomes
“increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time.” Immaterial/virtuosic labor is
moreover labor that is not exclusive to a particular class of worker, in the traditional sense of
class. Finally, this labor is labor that is non-identical to employment—labor that often exists in
voluntarily given as well as unwaged forms.
As Lazzarato and Virno point out, focusing on the turn from Fordist production in largescale industry and services in advanced capitalist nations in response to the global economic
crises of the 1970s, the attributes above do make immaterial/virtuosic labor similar, in an
interesting way, to the activity of artists—and that of performing or “relational” artists in
particular. But the same attributes may also leap out, to anyone familiar with feminist debates
from the same era—roughly the 1970s to 1990s—as ones that define the affective work and
reproductive activity of women worldwide. The fact that the affective labor increasingly central
to all productive tasks under the hegemony of “immaterial” labor is “still most often performed
by women in subordinate positions”—and that all labor “with a high affective component” is
“generally feminized, given less authority, and paid less”—as Hardt and Negri acknowledge
briefly before immediately moving on to their discussion of “biopower” in Multitude,84 is
something that is curiously not given much systematic analysis in Multitude.”85 Reading just
Multitude, and/or A Grammar of Multitude, one is thus left uncertain as to what the exact
connection between immaterial and feminine labor really is (is it a historical relation, for
instance, or just an accidental homology?), as well as uncertain about the actual significance of
immaterial labor’s gendered inflection. This is in some ways ironic. For as half of the world’s
entire population, women are by far the largest, most multitudinous of the global groups—
including the homeless, unemployed, permanently disabled, and others—whose exclusion from
Marx’s concept of working class, which was based on his analysis of 19th century industry, is
what the extra-parliamentary left’s concept of “multitude” was invented to rectify; “multitude”
being a radically expanded, global concept of class defined precisely by its doing of immaterial
labor.
The specifically feminine character of the emotional work Hochschild began studying in
the U.S. in the early 1980s comes more apparent when one shifts the scale of analysis to the
global economy, and to recent trends in caring work in particular. For while women in the
36
United States, Italy, Germany, Hong Kong, and other highly developed nations have been
increasingly “subcontracting” their caring labor over the last few decades to migrants from the
global South, this new group of affective laborers—nannies, domestic servants, childcare
providers, personal attendants, home health aides, mail-order brides, and sex workers—are
overwhelmingly women as well. The fact that a single mother in Los Angeles seeking a live-in
nanny for her five year-old son, and a wife in Hong Kong looking for a caregiver to help her
elderly mother-in-law with daily activities such as bathing, dressing, eating, and going to the
toilet, are much more likely to hire a woman to perform these intimate services, can only be
explained by the ideological fact that caring work or “kin work” in the household—even when
purchased on the market, in contrast to its informal or unpaid counterpart— continues to be
viewed by the majority of the globe as work that is performed “best” (i.e. more skillfully, and
properly) by women. Thus while the sexual division of affective labor is increasingly subdivided
along racial and hemispheric lines, around the globe it is still women who do, or arrange for and
administrate, the work of caring for others. The simple fact that caring labor is gendered is in
fact producing consequences that go far beyond relationships within the family, in a way that has
come to change the economies and social norms of countries in the world system. Since men in
the Third World (like their counterparts in the First) have not stepped in to do more caring work
at rates approaching those at which Third World women have been putting their caring labor on
the global market (due not just to the First World demand for caregivers, but female caregivers),
the women who migrate to care for the children, elderly, and ill or disabled relatives of First
World women, leave behind their own children, elderly, and disabled in a way that some argue
has resulted in an alarming “care deficit” in their home countries.86 The global postindustrial
economy—an economy marked by the expansion of low-paying jobs requiring affective labor—
thus creates the post-nuclear family which right-wing U.S. politicians have blamed on the moral
failings of individual women and men;87 a new familial organization that in a reflexive feedback
loop, contributes to the gendered inflection of postindustrial work. The “growing feminization
of migration” in today’s economy (roughly two-thirds of Filipino migrants to all countries
around the world are women, for example, as are 84 percent of Sri Lankan migrants to the
Middle East), and its larger, still unfolding social and civic ramifications, is thus tied to the
gendered nature of affective labor, explicitly. This “global transfer of emotional resources” has
been structurally reinforced and compounded, moreover, by the increasing economic dependency
37
of poor countries on the remittances of its migrant caregivers. As Rhacel Salazar Parreñas notes,
some 34 to 54 percent of the entire Filipino population is sustained entirely by money sent home
by migrant workers of whom a significant majority is female.88 What has therefore ensued,
again from the simple fact that affective labor is considered feminine labor, is nothing less than a
global economic relationship—and one that “mirrors the traditional relationship between the
sexes.”89 The Philippines become the “wife” of the United States and Hong Kong; Sri Lanka
becomes Saudi Arabia’s maid.
Note that having a “high affective component” by no means disqualifies the activity
feminized by it from also involving manual labor or being physically strenuous—as the specific
kind of labor done by sex workers and home health aides makes obvious. Affective labor is in
fact as much of a subset of reproductive labor, a category deliberately revised and expanded by
second-wave feminists (and in tandem with Althusser’s effort to extend the somewhat hazy
concept of “social reproduction” in Marx to include the reproduction of ideological and political
as well as economic practices90), as it is a subset of the immaterial labor underwriting the
concept of multitude. As Nancy Hartsock stressed in a now classic essay, for materialist
feminists, “reproduction” refers to the reproduction of labor power, as mediated through the
institution of the family and the medium of kinship, in a generational as well as daily sense.91
Reproduction thus includes both biological reproduction of the species, and social reproduction
of the labor force. For this reason it includes domestic as well as caring labor—as well as, more
controversially, what other feminists have called “sex-affective production” or “labor in the
concrete bodily mode.” Defined as “childbearing, childrearing, and the provision of nurturance
and sexual satisfaction,” reproductive activity, is, in short, work associated not just with women,
but mothers. This is inevitably the case in a world where all women are viewed in some
relationship to motherhood, or where, as Linda Nicholson puts it, women and men still occupy
their distinctive relations to reproductive and productive activity in connection with extraeconomic rules regulating marriage and sexuality.92
As Hartsock’s emphasis on mothering brings into especial focus, the end product of
women’s reproductive activity—like the end product of the immaterial labor of the post-Fordist
multitude, as defined by Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri, and others—is, quite literally, “new
subjectivities” or “forms of life.” The homology between the feminist concept of women’s
reproductive labor, and the autonomist account of post-Fordist labor—both of which proceed
38
from critiques or attempts to update Marx’s original concepts of labor and production, which
were formulated under and in response to the hegemony of industrial production—is especially
striking in this moment from Hartsock’s account of the former:
The female contribution to subsistence represents only a part of women’s labor. Women also
produce/reproduce men (and other women) on both a daily and a long-term basis. This
aspect of women’s “production” exposes the deep inadequacies of the [traditional Marxist]
concept of production as a description of women’s activity. One does not (cannot) produce
another human being in anything like the way one produces a chair. Much more is involved,
activity which cannot easily be dichotomized into play or work. Helping another to develop,
the gradual relinquishment of control, the experience of the human limits of one’s actions,
these are all important features of women’s activity as mothers. Women as mothers even
more than workers are institutionally involved in processes of change and growth, and more
than workers, must understand the importance of avoiding excessive control in order to help
others grow…. (Interestingly, much of women’s wage work—nursing work, social work, and
some secretarial jobs in particular—requires and depends on the relational and interpersonal
skills women learned by being mothered by someone of the same sex.) [224-5]
Work that relies on “relational and interpersonal skills” and “cannot easily be dichotomized into
play or work”; work that helps others to grow by giving them a certain amount of autonomy and
relinquishing “excessive control”: note how closely this description of women’s reproductive
activity resembles the kind of post-Fordist labor that our late 20th century zanies, ranging from
the cable guy to Montano’s garage-talker, at once perform and represent. So while it may still be
true that “one does not (cannot) produce another human being in anything like the way one
produces a chair,” under the paradigm of production characterized by the rise of immaterial labor
and the shift to “performance management” (or at least, according to its own rhetoric), one
produces chairs in something very much like the way one produces human beings.94
Indeed, for Antonella Corsani, the category of reproduction which second-wave feminists
expanded to include caring and “sex-affective” labor, also includes the production of
communications and cooperation featured prominently in the concept of immaterial labor.95
Here is her even further expanded definition of reproductive activity, which she argues, in our
current moment, has come to infiltrate production itself:
What is reproductive activity? It is the set of activities that create life, the cognitive, cultural,
and affective universe, a set of activities that runs from biological generation to domestic
labor and activities of social, emotional, communicational and relational reproduction. What
39
is happening with these activities today? Biological generation is becoming a new market, a
field of valorization in itself, through the sale of ‘organs without bodies’ and the renting of
the uterus. As for domestic labor, a new division of labor between women arises here.
Women are externalizing this activity of ‘low social value.’ We are thus witnessing the
development of personal services, clusters of jobs that reproduce the life of others.
Ultimately, the labor of reproduction as a set of activities that create life, the cognitive,
cultural, and affective universe, enters into production by modifying the nature of labor.
(125)
To be sure, what Corsani calls “communicational and relational reproduction”— an analytically
distinct activity umbrellaed, along with “biopolitical” and affective labor, by the broader
category of immaterial labor—is less obviously gendered than affective labor per se (I say “per
se” because it clear how much these two particular categories overlap). Yet, as a Pew study
reported in the February 2008 New York Times indicates, today’s primary creators of Web
content are surprisingly “digitally effusive teenage girls.” Among Internet users today under
18—which is to say, the rising generation of immaterial workers—girls not only eclipse boys as
bloggers and creators of their own Web pages, but also “when it comes to building or working on
Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15
to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17).”96 What is the cause for this gender
imbalance when it comes to the creation of online content, especially in the face of reverse
statistics for adults employed in the computer industry, where women hold only 27 percent of
jobs? According to the experts surveyed about this “feminization of the Internet,” the fact that
girls, in addition to being encouraged to be self-expressive or self-objectifying in the presence of
others (and thus to “make stories about themselves,” as well as excel in decorative arts), are
taught from an early age to cooperate and build social relationships: skills first learned by
children in the family which will prepare them to do work outside the home.
The crux we are confronting here is the gender specificity of a kind of labor—affective,
relational, and communicative—that Marxists and feminists since the mid-1970s onward have
observed to be in the process of becoming radically generalized. This ongoing process (the
generalization of a sexually particularized activity) raises a set of new questions, aesthetic and
political, about the affective style under scrutiny here. First: is the post-Fordist zany, as it were,
a woman? Second: if the isomorphism between the qualities of the labor of women, and the labor
of the postindustrial multitude, is neither accidental nor trivial, what is the exact nature and
40
significance of the relationship between them? Third, what are the possible implications of this
relationship for feminism?
Is the post-Fordist zany a woman? No and yes. There isn’t anything particularly
feminine about the zany, for one thing. This is true even if we can note that female zanies, called
zagne, were already appearing regularly alongside their male counterparts in commedia dell’arte
by the late 16th century. In fact, given its raucousness, boisterousness, and penchant for
destruction—from the lazzi (physical jokes) of Pulcinella and eventually Punch of Punch and
Judy, to the youthful capers of Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Tristam Shandy, and the ultimate
schoolboy farce that is Ferdyduke, to practically any novel by Philip Roth (but perhaps
especially Sabbath’s Theater, the story of a excessively virile and puerile avant-garde
puppeteer)—zaniness seems quite fairly described as a boyish aesthetic. The majority of the
high-art examples I’ve been relying on throughout this essay—including the ones featuring
female performers, such as Piper—would appear to attest to this, flying in face of any link
between zaniness and feminine labor. Yet, interestingly, there is a sense in which the more
popular examples of zaniness I have privileging, and especially the ones featuring male
performers, quite plainly suggest this to be the case.
Recall, for instance, the heavily allegorical plot of the recession-themed film The Toy,
and the steps we see Jack Brown take to actually achieve his eponymous role of “toy”: a sexually
charged term for the pluralized roles of a service worker. Blocked by racist hiring policies from
getting a job as a journalist for the city paper, Jack visits the unemployment office under the
name of “Jackie” to apply for a job as a “cleaning lady.” He is then hired, on the pointed
condition that he shave off his beard, as a maid for rich businessman U.S. Bates (Jackie
Gleason). Requiring Jack to wear a uniform of skirt, ruffled apron, and heels, this hiring marks
the precise moment when actual zaniness of the movie begins; verbal jokes abound prior to this
moment, but none of the physical comedy for which Pryor is famous (Fig. 18). It as if Jack’s
becoming zany—a process also coextensive with his becoming who he “really” is, namely
virtuoso performer Richard Pryor—were thus directly predicated on a process of “becoming
woman.” This is a point the film wants so much to emphasize that it seems willing to break with
its realist code to do it. (Are we seriously meant to think that no one at the Bates dinner party
notices that the hairy-legged server in the frilly apron and high heels is a man?)
41
The same could be said about the becoming-zany of the cable guy, though the film
suggests this from the reverse direction. Why else would all the strenuous performances of this
unemployed affective laborer—his inappropriately serious, and strangely vehement way of
responding to the lighthearted challenge of, say, an after-work basketball game—be so urgently
aimed at proving his adeptness at stereotypically male competences (competitiveness, sports,
fraternal camaraderie)? Why else would the cable guy seem to so desperately need so much male
drag—basketball costume, knight’s armor, etc.? If furthermore we read all the competitive
“playgrounds” depicted in this film as allegories of the post-Taylorist workplace, the cable guy’s
desperate efforts at strengthening male-male bonds in these specific arenas, as if to mark them as
specifically male homosocial spaces, start to look very compensatory. In this light it does not
seem accidental that the maniac in Kia’s “Maniac” is a virtuoso of post-Fordist performing
explicitly modeled after a female welder/dancer/actress (rather than, say, his more famous male
counterpart, zany car salesman Crazy Eddie [Fig. 19]); or that Old Gregg—singer, disco-dancer,
watercolorist, and unpaid promoter of Bailey’s—wears a pink ballerina’s tutu and has, well, a
vagina (Fig. 20). Indeed, as in the Greek myth of Baubo, the “primitive and obscene demon”
and “personification of the female genitals” invoked by Nietzsche at the end of his preface to the
second edition of The Gay Science,98 Old Gregg lifts his tutu to display this vagina to the man he
is significantly about to kidnap to his underground sea cave for some forced entertainment
(singing, art appreciation, dancing), as in the story of the queen of Eleusis who exposes herself to
amuse earth goddess Demeter. Like the cable guy, Old Gregg appears to desperately want to
shore up male homosocial bonding in the place where he performs; a site of anxious, forced,
strenuous “playing” that we might read, again, as an allegory for the postindustrial workplace—
a hidden abode of performance to which our access is explicitly predicated on a de-concealment
of the male worker’s female genitalia. As Old Gregg puts it: “I’ve got a mangina!”
Anatomical details aside, the meaning of all these frilly aprons, high heels, ballerina
tutus, and anatomical details could not be more straightforward. For the zanies in The Toy, The
Cable Guy, “Maniac,” and The Mighty Boosh, the post-Fordist workplace is not only a virtuosic
workplace lacking boundaries clearly defined by time or space. It is clearly also a feminizing
workplace. And the site or location of this feminizing labor now seems to be everywhere: home,
gym, restaurant, dance floor, sea cave. Post-Fordist zaniness thus speaks in a surprisingly direct,
even confrontational way to what Corsani calls the “‘becoming-woman of labor’”: a process that
42
not only involves the “setting to work of feminine competences” in a way that has come to affect
the very nature of labor (“its being as an activity that produces economic value, goods, and
services on the basis of extra-economic human qualities such as language, relationship, ability,
and affectivity”), but a “generalization of specifically feminine conditions to a growing fraction
of the active male population: precariousness, instability, and atypical contractual forms will no
longer be exclusively the feminine condition, but will encompass all of human activity” (126).
This is certainly not the kind of gender equality that feminists hoped to achieve, as Laura Kipnis
wryly notes.99 Feminism’s goal was to end the economic vulnerability of women, not to
redistribute that vulnerability more evenly between the sexes.
But if zaniness in The Toy and The Cable Guy thus indexes male anger, frustration, or
confusion about the post-Fordist feminization of work,100 the zany performances of Lucille Ball,
Karen Finley, and Laura Kipnis, which we will soon look at more closely, could just as easily be
read as encoding female ambivalence about the incursion of market forces into the heart of what
were once considered specifically “feminine” competences. Ambivalence because these
competences are one have been marked or preserved as “feminine” for centuries by the
institution of the family, and the ideology that continues to sustain the sexual division of labor
therein. Indeed, these feminine competences—caring activity, reproductive activity, and so on—
have up to only recently been “protected” by patriarchal forms of social organization from
capitalist valorization. Perhaps the confusion surrounding the gender of zaniness in The Toy, The
Cable Guy, and other texts reflects this larger ambivalence, on the part of women and men, about
whether the slow but clearly ongoing de-feminization of these feminine competences under
global capitalism is ultimately good or bad. We could thus read the ambiguous gender of the
post-Fordist zany as not just a metaphor for the gender ambiguity of immaterial/virtuosic labor,
but for a broader uncertainty about the larger socio-economic situation that the rise of
immaterial/virtuosic labor encoded by post-Fordist zaniness is part of. For while the radical
extension of “‘mechanisms of subjection applied above all and historically to women’” to
everyone hardly seems grounds for feminist celebration, as Kipnis notes, for Corsani the new
situation is also one “consisting of forms that are worth investigating and resistances, obstacles,
and modes of flight that are worth grasping” (126). This is perhaps especially the case to those
searching for new prospects for a revivifying alliance between Marxism and feminism; an
43
alliance long pursued by many feminists of the second-wave, but by their own account, never
satisfactorily achieved.
Given that the entry of women around the world en masse into the labor market, and the
rise of post-Fordist labor and management practices, are, roughly speaking, historically
coinciding developments, the gender ambiguity of post-Fordist zaniness could also be read as
reflecting an ambiguity about how the two phenomenon might actually related. Is it, for
instance, a systemic relationship? While The Managed Heart strongly implies, without directly
suggesting a causal link between the increased presence of women in U.S. workforce, and the
growing demand for jobs involving emotional labor in the United States, Corsani for her part
quite explicitly attributes the post-Fordist trend toward affective labor and “productive
reproduction” (i.e., the increasing repositioning of reproductive activities within production) to
the entry of women on the global marketplace for labor-power: “The entry of women into the
so-called sphere of production … contributed significantly to the cultural modification of the
nature of labor by introducing into it the characteristics proper to the social reproduction of life:
interrelationality, flexibility as an intelligent response to the unforeseen, creativity, subjectivity,
and the heterogeneity of tasks as so many characteristics that could not be left trapped within the
standardization of time and the objective measurement of value.” According to this account,
women are the direct, if unconscious agents of the global feminization of postwar work: “By
entering the labor market, women will have exported what had been their condition to the rest of
the world.”101 Yet it seems just as plausible to interpret the convergence between feminine and
immaterial labor dramatized by The Toy or “Maniac” the other way around: as a sign not so
much of the “export[ation]” of “feminine competences” into the labor market by female workers,
but of the gender-blind market’s penetration into “feminine competences.” In either case, as
Corsani puts it, the “new relationship between capital and life” reflected in the “‘biopolitical turn
of the economy,’” is “capitalism with a ‘feminine’ face” (107-108).
Post-Fordist zaniness thus finally confronts us with an antimony when it comes to gender.
In a way this is only to be expected, since it is an aesthetic that registers both the contradictions
of the capitalist mode of production, and those of work as defined and organized by a far less
volatile, yet nonetheless slowly changing sex-gender system: a mode of kinship and social
organization which could once be uncontroversially characterized as “patriarchal.” (Though this
is increasingly less so, a better term has yet to be discovered). Zany comedies like The Toy and
44
The Cable Guy register the contradictions of sex-gender precisely in its increasingly
complicated, and by no means necessarily collusive interactions with late capitalism. Zaniness is
not a feminine aesthetic. Yet the post-Fordist zany is, it would seem, a woman—or a worker
whose process of becoming zany coincides exactly with a process of feminization. How else are
we to read Jack’s transformation into Jackie, the invagination of Old Gregg, or the cable guy’s
increasingly desperate efforts to define his role as service provider as that of performing macho
acts? And how else are we to understand Kia’s intertextual correlation of selling cars to exotic
dancing in “Maniac”? Doing one’s job in the post-Fordist economy apparently demands that the
male employee turn himself into a “maniac on the [dance] floor,” a process which the
commercial explicitly equates to the process of becoming Jennifer Beals: a female performer
who still remains most famous for playing the role of another female performer, dancer Alex
Owens from Flashdance.
Set against the background of the now defunct steel industry in Pittsburgh, it could in fact
be argued that Flashdance itself is a story about the feminization of late 20th century labor, even
though its main character is female.102 (Women can be feminized, too.) Note, for starters, the
androgyny of the name “Alex,” which is just one of several ways in which the film makes the
gender of its protagonist seem initially ambiguous. If the political fantasy underlying the film’s
Cinderella story of a factory welder becoming a ballet dancer, is that of an entire society’s
painful but ultimately successful conversion from an industrial to a “virtuosic” economy, the
iconography of the film works to correlate this story about economic change to Alex’s individual
trajectory of “becoming woman.” It would not be an exaggeration, in fact, to say that the workerhero of Flashdance is deliberately presented as butch at the film’s “industrial” beginning,
precisely so she can be made femme by its “postindustrial” end. Note here that the thriving steel
plant depicted in the film is already a bit of nostalgic anachronism:103 by the year of the film’s
release, mills in Pittsburgh had already laid off 153,000 workers during the 1980-1982 recession.
Indeed, U.S. steel factories were already closing in the late 1970s, several decades before the free
trade agreements of the 1990s that led to the global exportation of manufacturing labor to the
Third World, due to demand lowered by global recession, the 1973 oil crisis, deregulation, nonunion “mini-mills,” and competition from Germany and Japan. (Though Pittsburgh did manage
to shift its economic base from heavy manufacturing to higher education, services, and medicine
by the 1990s, a “success” arguably predicted by the film’s upbeat ending with respect to Alex’s
45
future in ballet, the shift came with a drastic drop in its population, which shrank from around
660,000 in 1960, to 330,000 in 2000).
It’s against the backdrop of this painful industrial transition that the film plays out its
logics of gender difference. Alex is the only female worker we see at the steel factory, yet her
male co-workers don’t seem notice her sexual difference. The film repeatedly asks us to compare
her to other female characters across social divides, who are much more femme. One is the
socialite ex-wife of Alex’s boss; the other is Alex’s best friend Jeanie (Sunny Johnson), a
cocktail waitress who eventually becomes a stripper and pole dancer—sex-affective activity
which the film carefully represents as just one step “down” from flashdance, and one step “up”
from prostitution—after Jeanie gives up on her dream of being a professional ice skater. Alex,
on the other hand, pumps iron with her equally hard-bodied colleagues, “eats like a pig,” has sex
without much afterthought, and is accompanied throughout the film by an enormous male pit
bull. When she isn’t in her welding gear (helmet, industrial goggles, overalls, work boots), her
workout clothes, or her pop dance costumes (which are surprisingly androgynous, consisting of
suits with enormous, 80s-style shoulder pads), she’s clad almost exclusively in bulky sweatshirts,
work boots, and jeans.
All this masculine iconography seems set up at the beginning solely for the purpose of
being reversed in its polarity, in conjunction with Alex’s transition from steel mill worker to
student ballerina. Her feminizing switch from industrial to postindustrial labor, unionized
factory job to “virtuosic” work, is significantly mediated, however, through a more “informal”
kind of work—flashdance—which the film positions in a deliberately transitional zone: a zone
between industrial labor and “unproductive” labor, work and play, and masculine and femininity
(Fig. 21). If welding steel is unambiguously Labor, and ballet, Art, flashdance is somewhere in
between. Its economic status in the film is not just transitional but ambiguous: Alex does it to
pay for her ballet school tuition; at the same time, she describes it as a pleasurable activity
allowing for creative expression and artistic autonomy in its own right. These subtle distinctions
in the kinds of work Alex does, which could easily be measured on a scale of varying degrees of
“virtuosity,” are once again carefully correlated to shades of gender: if welding steel is masculine
labor, and classical ballet is feminine performance, flashdance, the intermediate “step” between
these two activities (more “immaterial” than welding, yet less “virtuosic” than ballet) is itself
presented in the film as half masculine, half feminine. Though as erotic dance, the genre it
46
belongs to is feminine, its style is fast, aggressive, and conspicuously athletic or physically
demanding. For all its sexual expressiveness, it evokes exercise designed to train and harden the
body, as in the tradition of Emile Jacque-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, one of the first attempts in
modern dance to integrate art and physical culture, and Rudolph Laban’s disciplinary movement
choirs, which were explicitly based on the rhythms of Taylorized work. It bears no resemblance,
by contrast, to the lyrical dance of Isadora Duncan. Flashdance thus at first seems
unambiguously androgynous, a dance genre stably fixed between two genders, as well as two
labor paradigms. But note that Alex’s first flashdance is a dance explicitly about metamorphosis,
in which a character in a square-shouldered man’s suit eventually casts that suit aside, like an
empty shell, and steps out wearing practically nothing but makeup, spangles, and heels (which is
also the moment when the dance picks up speed, difficulty, and grace). The “transitional” work
that facilitates Alex’s shift from the steel mill to the ballet academy (i.e., flashdance), is thus
defined in the dance itself as performing that makes a butch feminine. If the unconscious content
of late 20th century zaniness is postindustrial labor, Flashdance’s is the explicitly gendered
character of the economic transition from industrial to postindustrial labor.
Now Flashdance is not, in itself, a zany movie—or at least not in terms of its own affect.
Yet the aspects of its story that inspired “Maniac” should be kept in mind in thinking about an
equally zany, but far more complex piece of screen culture that also explicitly pays homage to
Flashdance in its diegesis. This is the bittersweet, surprise transatlantic hit comedy The Full
Monty (1997)104: a film about the devastating effects of long-term unemployment (including
depression, sexual impotence, and suicidal tendencies) as experienced by six former male
steelworkers from Sheffield, England (Fig. 22). The film is, more broadly, an intelligent
examination of how changes in the postindustrial economy have had a direct impact on ideas of
gender and the relations between sexes, and the impact of those changing ideas of gender on the
economy in turn. Along with the closing of the steel factory (which appears to have employed
men only), the film also depicts, in a noticeably less direct fashion, the concomitant rise of ample
but low-paying, benefitless jobs in services and retail; jobs which in the film seem occupied
almost exclusively (and apparently contentedly) by women. (The film also pointedly depicts a
textile factory staffed entirely by women, and supervised by the ex-wife of one of the main
characters, which seems to have somehow survived the shift in the economy, while the “male”
steel factory has not [Fig. 23].)105 How will the male workers in The Full Monty cope with and
47
respond to all these radical changes in England’s “industrial north?” By becoming naked
strippers for the entertainment, quite specifically, of women (Fig. 24). Once again, in the same
way we see unemployed Jack becoming into Jackie in order to finally become a “toy”; and the
car salesman becoming “Beals” on the floor of the factory showroom, the solution to the
postindustrial labor crisis seems to be a cross between sex-affective work and performance art.
If The Full Monty thus tells the story of an awkward, not clearly successful conversion of
permanently laid-off industrial workers, into a new “team” of postindustrial dancers, it is
nonetheless a conversation facilitated by a careful study, on the part of the six men, of a
Flashdance DVD which one character has stolen from Asda, the Wal-Mart-like megastore where
his wife works (Fig. 25). Watching the film inside the security booth of their empty factory, the
unemployed steelworkers jeer at Flashdance’s portrayal of its main character’s welding: “Her
mix is all to cock!”; “That’s too much acetylene, them joints won’t hold fuck all.” But they then
openly admire the dancing scenes, which after all, they have stolen this film about a female
dancer—whom they refer to as “Flashytits,” though the major point of the film is that Alex does
not flash her tits—to learn from and emulate.106
In The Full Monty, The Toy, and The Cable Guy, the message about male workers
confronting the grim challenges posed by unemployment thus could not be more direct. In order
to keep earning a wage in the postindustrial economy, male workers in advanced industrial
nations will have to … get zany. Getting zany—becoming a toy, maniac, or stripper—means
learning how to perform, how to “work it,” like a woman; getting zany means learning how to
dance (Fig. 26). For as both The Full Monty and Flashdance makes clear, “dancing” entails not
just virtuosic, but sex-affective work. As a physically strenuous activity that requires a supple
body, moreover, the specific kind of dancing showcased in these films also serves as a metaphor
for the postindustrial worker’s much vaunted “flexibility.” Such use of dance as allegory of
contemporary work is perhaps one reason for why dancing television shows, which are always
“reality” shows, which are almost always competitions, have been so popular in the United States
and Europe lately: from ABC’s Dancing With the Stars and Dance Machine, to Bravo TV’s So
You Think You Can Dance?, to MTV’s America’s Next Best Dance Crew (Fig. 27).
Postwar zaniness is thus, from one side of the gender divide, an aesthetic that encodes
male emotion about the feminization of postindustrial work. From the other side, as I suggested
earlier, it might be said to encode female emotion about capital’s concomitant penetration into a
48
set of competences once safeguarded as unambiguously feminine (by traditional family
structures that, according to feminist sociologists of work, have been showing increasing signs of
weakening in advanced capitalist countries.) Think, for instance, about the zaniness of I Love
Lucy, a postwar cultural artifact that is in some ways still contemporary, given that it has stayed
running in syndication on network and/or cable television ever since it premiered on CBS in
1951. Recall that the overarching concept of the series was unemployed housewife Lucy
Ricardo’s unceasing effort to participate somehow in the world of “showbiz”; either as a paid
performer, or by the “backstage” work of enhancing her husband Ricky’s career, as his
“informal” (unpaid) manager. Recall further that each of Lucy’s zany attempts to break into
showbiz involved her temporarily taking on an extra or temporary job involving some kind of
virtuosic or affective labor: learning ballet (“The Ballet,” February 18, 1952); selling and then
un-selling salad dressing on television (“The Million Dollar Idea,” January 11, 1954), babysitting
and managing child talent (“The Amateur Hour,” January 14, 1952); working as a magician’s
assistant (“Lucy Tells the Truth,” November 9, 1953; “Lucy Meets Orson Welles,” October 15,
1956); opening a women’s dress boutique (“The Girls Go Into Business,” October 12, 1953);
competing in a game show (“Ricky’s Hawaiian Vacation,” March 22, 1954) [Fig 28a-c]. And if
not by taking an actual paying job in services, retail, or education (usually to earn money to
purchase a professional female performer’s means of production: clothes), then by Lucy’s
impersonation of a worker in services, retail, or education: a hot dog vendor (“Lucy Meets Bob
Hope,” October 1, 1956), a real Hollywood agent (“Ricky Needs an Agent,” May 16, 1955); a
hotel bellhop (“The Star Upstairs,” April 18, 1955); a celebrity chauffeur (“Lucy Meets the
Moustache,” April 1, 1960) [Fig. 29a-d]. Things get especially zany when Lucy’s performance
of the role of a service or access-point worker becomes almost too virtuosic, as in “Ricky Needs
an Agent,” where, wearing glasses and a 1950s power suit, she masquerades as Ricky’s
representative to incite MGM into making a movie deal for him. She does this by telling the
MGM representative that her client’s been offered a Broadway musical, which of course he
hasn’t. Having acted the role of “the agent” so well as to convince the MGM representative of
the musical’s reality, Lucy ends up accidentally persuading the studio to release Ricky from his
contract—entirely. She then ends up having to perform the role of “herself,” housewife Lucy
Ricardo, in order to convince the MGM rep of the existence of a “crazy woman” impersonating
Ricky’s agent. Whether paid or unpaid, and whether performed as real labor (“The Girls Go Into
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Business”) or as a mere playing at the forms and appearances of labor which ends up generating
indistinguishable effects (“Ricky Needs an Agent”), each of Lucy’s temporary occupations
required her to perform in some sort of disguise or costume; as if to suggest that working a job,
and performing a role, are more or less the same activity. Which is of course, always patently
the case in show business. Is this the real reason why Lucy wants to join this world; because it is
one in which the homology between the two activities becomes most publicly visible?
It seems telling here that I Love Lucy does not depict the world of employed performing
that Lucy so desperately wants to join, as a particularly masculine world. However much
associated with her husband Ricky, “showbiz” is carefully represented as a world comprised of
as many female as male performers, including Lucy’s own best female friend, retired
vaudevillian Ethel (Vivian Vance). Far from reinforcing the boundary between male and female
worlds of work, this detail suggests that we read Lucy’s zaniness as the affective expression of
her frustration in perceiving a lack of substantial difference between the kind of “performing”
called for in both domains. It is the proximity, and not the distance, between the type of work
involved in showbiz, and the kind of extra or sideline work Lucy has to do to enter it, that is the
source of her zaniness. Here the show introduces another dialectical twist. For by dramatizing
Lucy’s repeated failure to get into showbiz, and returning her to her housewife role at the end of
every episode (so she can start the process anew on the next one), I Love Lucy makes sure that
this homology between feminine labor and virtuosic labor is one that every episode demonstrates
successfully. For isn’t every extra job that we see this American housewife take on, as an
intermediate step towards achieving her ultimate goal of becoming a professional performer, a
job that involves … performing? And though Lucy Ricardo’s hilarious efforts to break into
showbiz never succeed, aren’t those very failures (which are of course the source of every bit of
physical comedy) testifying constantly to the virtuosity of that ultimate female zany, Lucille
Ball?
One of television’s first “reality” shows, with references to the real world of “showbiz”
and cameos of a wide range of professional entertainers playing themselves,107 I Love Lucy was
thus a zany sitcom explicitly about the late-capitalist homology between feminine and virtuosic
labor. Demonstrating the homology, by having its protagonist take on “extra” roles in which the
two kinds of labor conspicuously converge, was not just I Love Lucy’s whole narrative raison
d’etre, but the reason for its distinctive affect of “manic frivolity,” with Lucy’s process of
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becoming zany coinciding exactly with her strenuous efforts, on episode after episode, to get her
diegetic and extradiegetic audiences (Ricky, Fred and Ethel; the American viewing public), to
recognize the existence of that homology. In a process strikingly coextensive as well with that of
housewife Lucy Ricardo becoming comic virtuoso Lucille Ball (as we see Jack’s process of
becoming zany coincide with his becoming Richard Pryor), Lucy Ricardo’s becoming zany is a
process of turning “women’s work” into performance art.
Virtuoso Karen Finley gets zany to highlight the same homology, but from the reverse
direction: turning performance art into domestic work in a trajectory that coincides with her
becoming a nameless housewife. I am referring here to Finley’s self-restylization in the 1990s,
from ribald, in-your-face, live performer into the frantically SWEEPING BUFFING DUSTING
POLISHING WAXING VACUUMING BAKING BEATING BLENDING CHOPPING GRATING SLICING DICING
MIXING MAKING CLEANING COOKING FREEZING SQUEEZING PEELING BLANCHING BOILING BROILING
ROASTING BROASTING SIMMERING STEAMING SAUTÉING POACHING FRYING BROWNING BURNING
OILING CREAMING FOLDING WHIPPING PUREEING ICING FROSTING ADDING COOKING MEASURING
SCOOPING SCRUBBING STACKING SORTING STARCHING SCALDING BLEACHING FOLDING IRONING
STRAIGHTENING WASHING HEMMING MENDING CROCHETING KNITTING QUILTING KNOTTING
MACRAME EMBROIDERING SEWING NEEDLEPOINTING STITCHING SOAKING DRYING HANGING
protagonist of Living it Up: Adventures in Hyperdomesticity,108 a humor book Finley explicitly
singles out in her memoir (along with Enough Is Enough, a parody of women’s self-help and/or
affective-management literature), as marking an important turning point in her overall career as a
performer. Up by 4 AM and ready with a hot-glue gun, the mission of Living it Up’s constantly
alert, “non-jobless unemployed”109 protagonist, is to help women manage the “guilty [feelings
we have] that we aren’t making something out of nothing constantly in our hectic lives” by
finding “projects” in every occasion (94-95) “Have a little extra time? Knit an entire shamrock
to cover your house like a tea cosy!” (32). We are similarly encouraged to make “Underwear
Sachets” out of pine needles shed by a dying Xmas tree, bathmats out of human hair found in the
shower drain, hand-crocheted sandwich bags for our kids’s lunches, and our own creatively
decorated funereal caskets (Fig, 30). With its savagely italicized, exclamation-point riddled
prose, Living it Up’s particular way of highlighting the link between “women’s work” and
virtuosic labor, brings out a feature of post-Fordist zaniness which we have not yet discussed
explicitly, but in some ways have been noticing all along. The zany is not just funny, but angry.
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As one final illustration of zaniness as a style indexing strong, but often mixed or
ambivalent female feelings about late capital’s appropriation of a set of affective and/or
reproductive competences once distinctively marked feminine, we might consider the distinctive
synthesis of rage and elation that infuses Laura Kipnis’s recent writings on sex, gender, and
culture. Kipnis’s angry glee, or affect of furious exuberance in Against Love: A Polemic (2003),
for instance, her first book for nonacademic as well as academic audiences, seems intimately
related to the book’s main topic: “private life in post-industrialism,” and its transformation of
sexual intimacy into the “latest form of alienated labor.” More precisely, while focusing on the
same irony dramatized in I Love Lucy and Living It Up—the transformation of the domestic
sphere into a site of hyper-rationalized work, while the postindustrial workplace becomes a site
of performance, creativity and play— Against Love celebrates adultery as a way in which latecapitalist subjects try to escape the injunction to “work at love,” even while knowing this
solution inevitably founders on the contradiction of escaping to what it wants to escape from.
Just as the zaniness of The Gay Science emerges in/as a failure of gaiety, adultery in Against
Love is a reckless and failed attempt to “solve” the problem of what Kipnis calls “labor-intensive
intimacy.” Kipnis keys this sexual strategy to “polemic”: a very specific rhetorical strategy
defined, in turn, by a very specific affect: “The best polemic against love would be to mimic in
prose the erratic and overheated behavior of its hapless practitioners: the rushes and excesses, the
inconsistent behavior and inchoate longings, the moment-by-moment vacillations between selfdoubt (“What am I doing?”) and utter certainty (“You’re the one”), all in quest of something
transformative and unknown” (49).
There is thus a very close relationship—we might say a zany one—between the rhetorical
style of Against Love, and the sex-affective labor it takes up as its subject matter (and as a
problem). If the “best polemic against love” (i.e. adultery) is a mimicking of love, and if love is a
sex-affective practice defined by “erratic and overheated” behavior, “rushes and excesses,” and
“inconsistent” longings, then adultery is a zaniness redoubled: a “zanying” of something already
zany to begin with. (If love is an ideological charlatan or mountebank, as Kipnis implies, then
adultery is its zany.) Hence the “rushes and excesses”— of her polemic’s own “erratic and
overheated” style. Note, for instance, the short, rapid, outburst-like sentences, the staccato
sounds and jagged rhythm, of the following formally as well as thematically representative
passage:
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Yes, we all know that Good Marriages Take Work: we’ve been well tutored in the catechism
of labor-intensive intimacy. Work, work, work; given all the heavy lifting required, what’s
the difference between work and ‘after work’ again? Work/home, office/bedroom: are you
ever not on the clock? Good relationships might take work, but unfortunately, when it comes
to love, trying is always trying too hard: work doesn’t work. Erotically speaking, play is
what works….
Yet here we are, toiling away. Somehow—how exactly did this happen?—the work
ethic has managed to brownnose its way into all spheres of human existence. No more
play—or playing around—even when off the clock. (18)
If postindustrial zaniness is an affective style about sex-affective labor, it’s hardly surprising to
see Kipnis’s writing get zany in the contradictory effort to praise one sex-affective practice
(adultery) while simultaneously polemicizing against another (love). Sex-affective practice
(adultery), and the aesthetic about sex-affective labor that is post-Fordist zaniness, are in fact
dialectical images of one another in Against Love. Both are responses to the rise of “laborintensive intimacy,” or the convergence of work and play that increasingly defines public and
private life in late capitalism. And both, like gay science, take the form of experimentation:
“Adultery is to love-by-rules what the test tube is to science: a container for experiments. It’s a
way to have a hypothesis, to be improvisational… Like any experiment, it might be a really bad
idea or it might be a miracle cure—transubstantiation or potential explosion. Or both.”
Though it polemicizes against “labor-intensive intimacy,” Against Love deliberately does
not make the gender of sex-affective labor an issue. Since “these days either partner [in a
romantic relationship] can play either gender role, masculine or feminine, regardless of sex or
sexual orientation,” Kipnis argues, “gender will not be a significant aspect of our discussion.”
Yet the most explicit and direct way in which late capitalism extracts surplus value from sexual
intimacy, as Kipnis herself points out, is through the booming cultural industry of relationship
advice—a self-help discourse explicitly geared to women desiring to “become more loveable.”
Against Love’s relationship to this genre is interestingly equivocal; indeed, as a nonfiction work
about love and sexual relationships that we can easily imagine someone wanting “help” with
these issues picking up, it seems to recklessly flirt or court comparisons with it. The zany
question of sex-affective labor’s gender, which Against Love deliberately brackets at the level of
content, thus could be said to return at the level of the book’s own generic affiliation, as well as
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by its “erratic and overheated” style: “We players in the adultery drama will be especially beset,
madly flinging ourselves down uncharted paths in states of severe aporia” (48).
Appreciating the “especially beset” style of Against Love’s polemic/praise doesn’t entail
accepting its argument. For all of the utopianism Kipnis attributes to adultery, which, by way of
a discussion of Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs, she eventually develops into an interesting
metaphor for the feeling of “something missing” in the political lives of Americans, her praise of
it completely abandons the idea that under the right social conditions, work could be source of
satisfaction—a hope that Marx himself seems to hold on to, even in his criticisms of Proudhon
and utopian speculation in general, in the idea of a postcapitalist society finally enabling what he
calls “full development of activity itself.”110 By contrast, Against Love’s allergy to the slightest
hint of any relation between sexuality and non sex-related activity (mental or physical), leaves us
with an strangely romantic, anti-Foucauldian, and even de-sexualized image of the former: as
something which can only be damaged by any application of historical technique, practice, or
thought. Certainly Freud would object to this approach to eros, ostensively in its own name or on
its behalf, as an unstructured, socially unmediated, raw experiential anarchy. Furthermore,
Against Love seems to deliberately ignore how the postindustrial idea of “working at love”
pertains not just to companionate couples in private life, but to nannies, mail-order brides, and all
the other women featured in Hochschild and Ehrenreich’s study of contemporary global trends in
caring and/or sex-affective labor. Here, love that takes work is paid wages used to support entire
families of loved ones back home (including, of course, the worker’s own children, elderly
parents, and sexual partner[s]).111 In the public as well as private sphere (and in the space
between them, as when care providers work for wages in households), love and sex are quite
explicitly work—and have been for centuries. My point is not that the specific conflation of
love and sex that Kipnis examines is not unproblematic, or that it can’t be exploited (like most
affective labor, it routinely is); only that Kipnis seems too easily scandalized by it at times. In
fact, at times the target of her zany polemic seems to be less to be the capitalist valorization of
sex-affective work, or the cultural devaluation of sex-affective work, than sex-affective work,
period: the fact that such a category of activity (which certainly predates postindustrial
capitalism) even exists. What is “postindustrial” about affective labor is really its valorization or
real subsumption by capital, and its concomitant transformation from being a labor exclusively
performed by women in the private sphere, to a crucial aspect or dimension of all labor.
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There are thus moments in which the zaniness of Against Love gets in the way of its
argument. But what would its polemic be without this zaniness? In a kind of Nietzschean
maneuver, Kipnis undercuts a critique of her text on these grounds by opening Against Love with
a “warning” that deliberately minimizes its claim to seriousness. As she notes in the book’s
“Reader’s Advisory,” Against Love is meant to be read less as a series of propositions, than as a
speech act with perlocutionary force: “A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a
small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won’t injure you (well, not
severely); it’s just supposed to shake things up and rattle your convictions.” Note how the power
of zany polemic is simultaneously downplayed and exaggerated here, characterized as at once
dangerous (“explosive”) but also as impotent (“small”), as simultaneously threatening, but also
without any real power to injure. As she further cautions: “[P]olemics aren’t measured; they
don’t tell ‘both sides of the story.’ They overstate the case. They toss out provocations and
occasionally mockery, usually because they’re arguing against something so unquestionable …
it’s the only way to make a dent in the usual story.”
Given the gender of the sex-affective labor Against Love rails against, it is hardly
surprising to find its “erratic and overheated” style raised to a particularly high intensity in
Kipnis’s next book, The Female Thing: a book explicitly about femininity and women’s
ambivalence about it in feminism’s wake. If the zany is a “especially beset” person, “madly
flinging [himself or herself] down uncharted paths in states of severe aporia,” in The Female
Thing this beset person is quite explicitly a woman, bombarded by the interpellating speech acts
of “woman-positive” mass culture:
Girls: be thinner, sexier, more self-confident; stop dating creeps; get rid of those yucky
zits; and put the pizzazz back in your relationship. Something needs improving: your
lingerie, your stress levels, your orgasms (or lack of them). Are you in a “toxic
friendship”? Is your career in the doldrums? Is your boyfriend lying to you? Why not go
organic—eco-chic is hot! Here Are Nine Ways to Reinvent Your Body, Mind, and Social
Life—you can do it, all in your spare time, because you’re fabulous. Or can be soon—just
stop doubting yourself. (Self-doubt is not attractive.) Take this quiz, buy this amazing
new moisturizing deodorant (underarms get dry, too!), wax your eyebrows: you’ll feel a lot
better once you do. (9)
This is a virtuosic parody of what Kipnis calls the “girlfriend industry.” It is also a zany one, in
which the mimicry of the discourse’s manic frivolity seems unsettlingly close to the original.
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This seems due in part to Kipnis’s goal of producing a popular feminist criticism, which for her
entails reading women’s culture without being immediately dismissive of its own set of aesthetic
pleasures, which have clearly played a role in maintaining the psychological attachment of
feminists to the images of femininity it produces. Indeed, far from attempting to dissolve the
aesthetic styles of the girlfriend industry, The Female Thing seems to want to harness them for
itself—in order to produce a feminist critique of “the female thing” that will itself be widely
accessible, pleasurable, and popular. In the process, Kipnis makes it clear that femininity in late
capitalism clearly takes just as much labor (if not more) as sexual intimacy. Two issues treated as
analytically distinct in Against Love are thus revealed as inextricably linked in Female Thing: “If
there’s a desperate quality to female femininity these days—the fake balloonlike tits and babydoll drag—[it has] something to do with fact that the social glue that’s supposed to hold things in
place between the sexes [provides less and less adhesion” (32).
What results, in an even more pronounced way than in the case of Against Love’s
proximity to the relationship advice literature it mocks, is a work of feminist criticism that shares
the same style and form, the same “erratic and overheated” prose rhythms, of the feminine object
it is placing under critique. This is clearly a risky venture. Can a truly critical, as well as
popular analysis of why so many feminists remain attached to the models of femininity promoted
the culture industries, be conducted in the language of women’s culture without it comprising the
whole endeavor? It is the undertaking of this zany experiment that makes the language of The
Female Thing as furiously exuberant as any piece of “girlfriend industry” writing, and as studded
with as many witty and irreverent, self-deprecating apercus: “Being female at this point in
history is an especially conflicted enterprise, like Birkenstocks with Chanel, or trying to frown
after a Botox injection” (3). Glittering with references to brands and commodities, and inflected
with the same slightly “desperate quality” Kipnis attributes to “female femininity” above, this
hyper-feminine prose style is likely to come across to some readers as just grating, or irritating,
even when the industry’s sassy vernacular is clearly being appropriated for the purpose of
feminist critique. But then again, displeasure is part of, if not the whole point of the experience
of zaniness. And calling attention to the uncomfortable and contradictory aspects of
contemporary feminism’s relationship to femininity is the specific point of the very zany Female
Thing.
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While Against Love’s zaniness thus indexes anger about the convergence of work and
sexual intimacy, and that convergence’s effects on the length of the official working day, the
same affective style in Female Thing reflects ambivalence about the virtuosic work of producing
femininity: a temporally and spatially unbounded doing that is also, as Judith Butler has shown
us, a perpetual re-doing, or reproduction. Femininity is something one can never stop working
at. Femininity, which requires unceasing virtuosic or immaterial labor, is thus what makes
contemporary women … zany. The Female Thing’s wager is that women’s ambivalent
attachment to this female thing can be effectively analyzed through an equally zany feminism.
The convergence between virtuosic labor and domestic labor that characterizes both
postindustrial working life, and private life, returns here as an uneasy intersection between a
zany object (femininity) and an equally zany method (feminist parody): “Feminism (‘Don’t call
me honey, dickhead”) and femininity (“I just found the world’s best push-up bra”) are in a big
catfight, nowhere more than within each individual female psyche” (6).
Yet for all the correlations between its subject matter (femininity) and the manic affect of
its critique, The Female Thing finally reminds us that there is nothing inherently feminist about
zaniness. Nothing could be zanier—that, is, more desperate or frantic in its insistence on being a
source of fun—than the girlfriend industry which is the explicit target of The Female Thing’s
feminist critique. Indeed, the Girls Gone Wild franchise, like much of the “raunch culture”
aggressively embraced today by educated women claiming to be sexually empowered (a
phenomenon intelligently examined by Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs), is just as zany, in
its own way, as Yams Up My Granny’s Ass; just as zany as any street action by Piper, or any
chicken dance by Montano. The politics of postmodern zaniness are clearly as ambiguous as the
aesthetic’s own gender. But to say that the gender of zaniness is ambiguous is not, however, to
say that zaniness is indifferent to gender (as, for instance, the aesthetics of the interesting seem to
be). As both our male and female zanies have shown us, gender clearly matters to, and becomes
an issue for this aesthetic about work, even if the question of its own gender is never resolved.113
The post-Fordist zany’s gender ambiguity is thus politically ambiguous, and particularly with
regard to what the changes in the mode of production it indexes—the rising dominance of
affective labor, the erosion of the boundary between work and play, and the increasing
integration of reproductive activities into production—tell us about the increasingly complicated
relationship between capitalism and patriarchy under globalization, or the present and future
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state of social and economic relations between the sexes. For these reasons, and in the spirit of
what Eve Sedgwick calls “weak theory,”114 the question of the political significance of the postFordist zany’s ambiguous gender seems best met with a weak thesis. Zaniness is not, to repeat, a
feminist aesthetic. But it is an aesthetic which those who hold the “conviction that gender has
been, and continues to be, a fundamental category for the organization of culture,” and that “the
pattern of that organization usually favors men over women,” are far more likely to have a
political stake in than those who do not.115 And all the more so because of the unique set of
problems that this aesthetic about affective and/or virtuosic production raises: the problem of
insufficient “distance” from others; the increasing disintegration of distinctive, spatially and
temporally bounded spheres of work and play; and the specifically affective problem of “fun.”
Distance/proximity, work/play, pleasure/unpleasure: these questions raised by postFordist zaniness clearly have a wide range of implications beyond the aesthetic realm proper, as
our cable gay, toy, maniac, and housewife have shown us. Our focus so far has mainly been on
the political content of this aesthetic category. Turning more specifically now to a feminist
discourse influenced specifically by Nietzsche, I want to shift our attention to the zany’s
meaning for aesthetic theory itself.
Why Postmodern Feminism Is So Zany
The disquieting nearness of persons who do affective work (The Cable Guy); the eroding
boundary between labor and leisure (Living It Up, Against Love); and the paradox of “fun”
(Forced Entertainment, The Female Thing): as we have seen, post-Fordist zaniness highlights the
problems of distance, play, and pleasure. But what are “distance,” “play,” and “pleasure” if not
some of the most prominent loci for theoretical debate in the history of philosophical aesthetics?
It seems possible, in fact, to write a relatively comprehensive survey of western aesthetics—
“from Classical Greece to the Present,” even—organized solely around these three themes.
“Play” would include Heraclitus, Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dewey, Callois,
Huizinga, and Winnicott. “Distance” would feature Plato (on the dangers of mimesis); Kant (on
the “safe distance” necessary for the dynamical sublime), Edward Bullough (on “Psychical
Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle”); Walter Benjamin (on aura as “the
unique phenomenon of a distance no matter how close [the object] may be”); Adorno (on
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autonomous art’s necessary distance from “the social”); Brecht (on the theory of alienation), and
Fried (on art’s appropriate distance from the spectator). “Pleasure” would be our thickest
chapter, as it goes to the subjective core of the aesthetic relation, encompassing debates about the
unique and complex feelings underwriting all our different varieties of aesthetic experience, from
Aristotle on catharsis, to Kant on disinterested satisfaction, to Poe, Noel Carroll, and Linda
Williams on the seemingly paradoxical aesthetic pleasures of horror, melodrama, and even
pornography.
The problems raised by the zanies we’ve encountered above, male and female are also
strikingly ones that have had a longstanding import for late 20th century feminist theory. Think
of the multiple ways in which “distance” has emerged as a specifically feminist controversy over
the last few decades: from the theme of female/feminine “overidentification” with media
spectacle, and the über-spectacle of the cinematic image of Woman, in particular, explored by
Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Linda Williams, Jackie Stacey, and other feminist film critics
of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s; to the psychological, epistemological, social, and ethical
ramifications of the presumed “lack of separation” between little girls and their mothers explored
by Nancy Chodorow, Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Carol Gilligan (1970s-1980s);
from the contentious idea of the female body’s “overwhelming presence-to-itself” as grounds for
a distinctively feminist literary aesthetic, as foregrounded in the anti-phallogocentric “language”
feminism of Irigaray and Cixious; to the explicit challenging of this idea by Monique Wittig,
Rita Felski, and others. These debates are all strikingly concentrated around the moment of
capitalism’s post-Fordist turn; i.e. from the 1970s onward.
The question of the boundary between work and play, by contrast, has figured centrally in
over two centuries of feminist discussion about the ambiguous status of women’s unpaid and
paid activity in the household: from nineteenth-century debates about whether “domestic work
should be “socialized” by being brought into the public sphere (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), or
kept in the private sphere but made more scientific (Catherine Beecher)”116; to second-wave
Marxist-feminist discussions about domestic labor’s economic role in the daily and generational
regeneration of labor power, and ideological role in the reproduction of the relations of
production of capitalism (through the housewife’s role of socializing children into the existing
division of labor and “cushioning” men against the alienation of their wage labor”).117 They also
range from the claims by Lotta Feminista and the international Wages for Housework movement
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in the early 1970s, that “women’s demand for pay for housework is today the most revolutionary
and strategic demand for the whole class”118; to contemporary arguments by Nancy Folbre,
Duncan Ironmonger, Michael Bittman and other social policy makers on behalf of “comparable
worth” (a system of valuation which would more specifically underpin government subsidies to
stay-at-home parents for the work of raising and socializing children, and/or state-funded
compensation for the “opportunity costs” to those involved).119 This problem is one that of
course confronts waged domestic workers as well, and especially “live-in” workers who do their
caring labor in the private households of their employers. Yet as Ann Ferguson notes, the main
question raised by older version of the domestic debate, “how to draw the line between work and
play or leisure activity when the activity is not paid,”120 is as much a question for philosophy as
economics. The activity of playing with children (which as it turns out, was recently proven by
neuroscientists to be a direct factor in the development of the infant brain), becomes a
particularly ambiguous category in this regard: “Is a mother playing with her baby working or
engaged in play? If the former, then her hours in such activity may be compared with those of
her husband or partner to see if there is an exploitation relation present, for example, if his total
hours of productive and reproductive work for the family are less than hers. But to the extent
that childrearing counts as leisure activity, as play, as activity held to be intrinsically valuable, no
exploitation is involved.” As Ferguson notes,
Perhaps childrearing and other caring activity is both work and play, but only that portion,
which is necessary for the psychological growth of the child and the worker(s) counts as
work. If so, who determines when that line is crossed? Since non-market activity does not
have a clear way to distinguish work from non-work, nor necessary from non-necessary
social labor, an arbitrary element seems to creep in that makes standards of fairness difficult
to apply to gendered household bargains between men and women dividing up waged and
non-waged work.121
The problems of distance/proximity and play/work raised by post-Fordist zaniness are thus
problems for feminism across a range of disciplinary registers—economics, politics, psychology,
and philosophy.
But due to feminism’s longstanding and still ongoing battle against its pernicious media
image as “the killjoy, the moral overseer, the puritanical cleaner of speech,”122 it is in the domain
of culture where the problems shared by zaniness and feminism have become most charged,
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around specifically affective problem of fun. “Fun” has ironically developed into a source of
constant anxiety for feminism, and in a way not particularly assuaged by self-conscious
reflection. In fact, the increasingly concerted efforts by feminists in the last few decades to
dispel this “killjoy” image by more explicitly or aggressively insisting on feminism’s allegiance
to gaiety, has made the aesthetics of pleasure all the more glaring as a specifically feminist
problem. As in the case of The Gay Science, what results from the amplification of the
insistence is thus an amplification of the original affective paradox, as the speech act of
proclaiming feminism’s lightheartedness ends up being made “unhappy” (in J. L. Austin’s
sense), by its often serious or anxious tones. “Laughter in the face of serious categories is
indispensable for feminism,” Judith Butler states determinedly, in an oft-quoted moment from
Gender Trouble.123 “Now the last impression that I would want to promote is that I lack a sense
of humor,” worries Mary Ann Doane, citing Meaghan Morris on “that most terrifying of media
bogeys, that dreaded figure who looms so large in our language that women toil untold hours
over their prose to write her off—the humorless feminist.”124 The irony here, of course, is that
the extra affective toil toward the goal of dispelling this image of the anhedonic, unhappily
striving feminist, is more than likely to strengthen feminism’s cultural associations with affective
toil—and all the more so given that the specific toil of affective management always necessarily
doubles back on itself. As Hochschild notes in The Managed Heart, emotional labor
paradoxically includes the work of not just doing but erasing signs of emotional labor, if the
reassuring cheeriness of the flight attendant, or the lightheartedness of the feminist scholar, are to
come across as truly convincing.125
The alliance of thought with laughter that Nietzsche calls for so insistently in The Gay
Science, though viewed by him as part of an explicitly “masculine” aesthetics of production (in
contrast to a “feminine” aesthetics of spectatorship or reception),126 is thus a style that
contemporary feminists have just as strenuously pursued, in popular or mainstream as well as
academic culture. Examples range from feministing.com blogger Jessica Valenti’s sassy and
“sex-positive” Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, to
works by feminist philosophers and theorists influenced in a much more direct way by
Nietzsche. From Luce Irigarary’s claim that “laughter is the first form of liberation from a
secular oppression” while “the phallic” is “tantamount to the seriousness of meaning”; to Helene
Cixious’s praise of laughter because it can “break up the truth” (“The Laugh of the Medusa”); to
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Butler’s celebration of the “explosive laughter” that compels us to recognize that gender is a
copy without an original; to Diana Davis’s praise of Irigaray, Cixous, and Butler as “good
laughers” whose “chortling hammer breaks up the Phallocratic Order by breaking up at it,”127
Nietzsche’s insistence on gaiety might be said to be the aspect of his philosophy that
poststructuralist feminist theory has most explicitly imported for itself—along with the very
same contradictions it poses in The Gay Science. As Morris notes, “Any writer may fear the
opprobrium incurred by an ugly overinsistence in a culture that values—however horrid the
topic—a ‘lightness’ and a ‘delicacy’ of touch. A woman writer, however, is confronted by a
doubled, or intensified terror of appearing ‘legalistic,’ defensive or accusatory—all highly
pejorative terms.” Writing in 1987, a moment when the question of Nietzsche’s style, in
conjunction with his attitudes toward women, was being brought to the fore by Derrida, Irigaray,
Sarah Kofman, Elizabeth Grosz, Clayton Koelb, Paul Patton and others, Morris continues: “The
reasons for this have to do with a history of misogynist representation … which can be far more
paralyzing in practice to women than demands for girlish display. It’s the history of the
distribution of myths of woman as constitutionally heavy—the stolid, earthbound beast, the
killjoy, the moral overseer, the puritanical cleaner of speech, the guardian of social custom (if not
symbolic law). If literary critics love to see themselves as criminals, what woman does not dread
(whatever her occupation) being seen as some man’s gaoler?”
What feminist does not dread being viewed as the moral overseer of another feminist,
including herself? Even a performer as insouciant and devil-may-care as Finley seems to have
had an anxious relationship to “fun.” Surprising as it may be, Finley’s story of her career in A
Different Kind of Intimacy (2000) is recurrently marked by regretful castigations of herself for
not being sufficiently lighthearted about the media’s attacks on her early performance works:
attacks based on misinterpretations, by her own account, of works that were “meant to be funny”
as [only] “incendiary.”128 “In retrospect, I wish I had had a sense of humor about it, that I had
used humor to puncture [his] posturing,” she says about a journalist’s scathing review of her
work in The Village Voice in 1986. Describing her decision to boycott a planned performance of
I’m an Ass Man at the ICA in London the same year (after being threatened with an obscenity
lawsuit from the British government), Finley berates herself once again: “I have to say that, as
with the Voice controversy, I had no sense of humor about the whole thing. I felt the political
situation I was in was too serious for me to allow myself to be funny or sexy” (41).
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Due to moments like these and others, at times it feels like the real drama of A Different
Kind of Intimacy lies less in its account of Finley’s central role in the culture wars of the ReaganBush era, or of the toll taken on her emotional and personal life by her involvement in NEA v.
Finley et al.; than in the story of a feminist anxiously trying to find the right relationship to being
“funny [and] sexy” over two and a half decades of virtuosic performing. It is crucial here to note
that her autobiographical narrative climaxes in an aggressively affirmative “archetype makeover”
which Finley describes as a shift from the “self-righteous self-involvement” of “being the Joan of
Arc of the art world” in the 1980s, to an embrace of “post-feminist self-involvement” and the
Los Angeles entertainment industry in the 1990s, including posing covered in chocolate for the
cover of Playboy. Facilitated in part by her temporary break from live performing in NYC to
writing Living It Up and Enough is Enough (zany parodies of domestic and/or affective labor
which she explicitly credits for “[bringing] my sense of humor back”), this deliberate trajectory
from feminist art-martyr, to popular female entertainer (humor book author, newspaper
cartoonist, mass-media sex symbol), was by Finley’s own account driven by an explicitly
feminist desire for lightheartedness. “The Playboy Studios bathrooms use toilets as rotating
superbidets—an effective shower for your private parts—which the models use before their
shoots. As I sat on one of these I felt I was in an Esther Williams musical, and I laughed.
Finally, I wasn’t taking myself so seriously.” This moment of non-seriousness is the climax of
the memoir; reading it, one can’t help but feel the narrator’s own sense of arrival (and relief).
Though never mentioned as an explicit motivation, it is hard not to read Finley’s
“archetype makeover” as a way of warding off the politically debilitating, as well as aesthetically
unappealing image of the un-fun feminist. This is a type whose genealogy we can trace back to
first-wave feminism’s alliance with nineteenth-century moral reform movements underpinned by
a protestant work ethic, up though the astounding cultural success of anti-pornography feminism
and its propagation of the media image of the “sex-negative” feminist in the 1970s. One can
sense the astringent presence of both of these historical characters—but also, crucially, the
problems produced by the desire to dispel them—in Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh’s
“Fem(me)inist Manifesto,” a short text first published in the academic journal Women and
Performance (1996) and then reprinted in the Arsenal Pulp anthology Brazen Femme: Queer
Femininity (2002).129 As Duggan and McHugh notes, “In the new millennium, fem(me)inism
grapples with the thorniest issues—desire and humor.”
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How can these be serious, one might ask, in the face of rampant social injustice, inequality,
racism, poverty? But this question of seriousness marks the very place where the enemies of
women, of feminists, of racial others, of social justice, of equality have launched effective
counter attacks. Feminists “have no sense of humor,’ they are ‘anti-pleasure.”
Imitating The Gay Science’s insistent affect, in a prose similarly bristling with italics,
exclamation points, and subtitles such as “Why Fem(me) Science is So Brilliant,” Duggan and
McHugh’s “Fem(me)inist Manifesto” attempts to parry these counter-attacks by advocating
something they call “fem(me) science,” which, in a rhetorical move akin to that of Kipnis’s
“Reader Advisory” in Against Love, they also immediately (and loudly) describe as a “joke”:
“Make no mistake, fem(me) science is a joke; a howl of laughter that would ridicule and
demolish any notion of the feminine that takes itself seriously. Fem(me) science calls for a
revaluation of all feminine values; it aims not to explain or instruct, but to evoke and provoke
those passions frequently seething under controlled, objective, and didactic prose” (169).
Duggan and McHugh’s attempt to deal with a distinctively feminist, but also distinctively
zany problem—the affective problem of “desire and humor”—is itself, of course, selfconsciously zany: as erratic and overheated, moreover, as the not-so-gay text by Nietzsche that
their “fem(me) science” mimics. As with the furious exuberance of Kipnis’s effort to grapple
with the eroding boundaries between work and play in the rise of labor-intensive intimacy, their
feminist manifesto’s insistent style of address, fast-paced prose rhythms, and manic frivolity, all
seem to emerge in direct response to the problems of “desire and humor” it diagnoses. And like
Kipnis’s “players in the adultery drama,” performers on the run from love, yet recklessly running
straight right back to it, Duggan and McHugh’s femme science evokes the image of “especially
beset” persons, “madly flinging [themselves] down uncharted paths in states of severe aporia” in
the effort to escape the un-fun feminist lumbering after them.
Yet it is possible to read the zaniness of “fem(me) science” as registering what Mary Ann
Doane describes as the very pressure on feminists to feel pleasure—a pressure often leading to
strenuous acts of affective management that as Doane cautions, can be just as oppressive as the
stereotype of the humorless feminist itself. The “erratic and overheated” style of Duggan and
McHugh’s Nietzschean feminism could thus be read as at once symptomatic of, and as a way of
negatively responding to, this “zany” catch-22 for feminism: as a way of expressing “pleasure,”
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and registering discomfort with the coercive pressures placed on feeling it at the same time. By
pushing “fun” to the edge of the un-fun, perhaps the same could be argued for the zaniness of
The Female Thing’s experiment with populist feminism, or Finley’s defiantly exuberant embrace
of “post-feminist self-involvement” (though the zaniness in this last case seems much more onesided.)
It is worth noting that Doane introduces her caution about the “pressure to laugh” in
“Masquerade Reconsidered”: a response to Tania Modeleski’s criticism of Doane’s earlier essay,
“Film and the Masquerade,” in which Doane marshals Joan Riviere’s psychoanalytical concept
of “womanliness” as performative “mask” to combat the Lacanian definition of femininity,
extended in the work of Nietzschean feminists such as Irigaray and Montrelay, as “sheer
proximity and … overwhelming presence-to-itself” (35-36). “Film as Masquerade” concludes
with Doane’s reading of a joke made at the expense of a female spectator in a photograph by
Robert Doisneau; a reading which Modeleski interprets, in the course of her more optimistic
reading of the depiction of women in classical cinema, as reflecting Doane’s inability to grant
women a sense of humor about their representations in popular culture (as reflected in their
inability to “get jokes”). It is this reading to which Doane responds with the comment cited
above: “Now the last impression that I would want to promote is that I lack a sense of humor.”
At the same time, however, Doane cautions that the historical pressures on feminist critics to find
progressive content and therefore specifically feminist pleasures in popular, mass-mediated
culture—a pressure clearly connected to feminism’s political desire to prove its sense of humor
to the public—can “blind us to the still pervasive ideological ordering of the sexual.” As she
continues,
At this historical moment in feminism [the late 1980s] there is a strong desire to read
differently if not to receive differently—even if this entails a violence against the set norms
of criticism, a rewriting of the critical questions. The pressures are great—the pressure to
feel pleasure, the pressure to laugh, the pressure to not feel excluded from the textual field of
dominant mass culture. Yet, feminist criticism must continually and insistently focus its gaze
on the enormous problems posed by a feminist aesthetics, and by the concept of subjectivity
as it is articulated with representation. (42)
By the last sentence of this passage, it is feminist aesthetics as such—for which the problem of
feeling/expressing or not feeling/expressing pleasure is now a synecdoche—that emerges as a
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concern for Doane, raising a meta-problem about the intersection of aesthetics and politics in
feminism more broadly. The issue of pleasure raised by the zany, in other words, underscores
how deeply but ambivalently bound up feminism remains, as a politics, with aesthetical
questions—and all the most so given women’s historically fraught relationship to aesthetic
discourse in general (due in very large part to the feminization of one aesthetic category in
particular, beauty.) On the one hand, the problem embodied by the unhappily toiling feminist—
redoubled by the very efforts by postmodern feminists to laugh her away—seems “merely” an
aesthetical problem: a petty and “feminine” problem of style or appearance, even. Yet surely no
one would argue that this merely aesthetical problem has not had damaging effects on a wide
variety of feminist political movements; doing more to kill off the interest and participation of
younger women, many say, than any specific feminist principle, organizational strategy, or
action. But is the implication then that for the sake of politics, feminism should hire a stylist to
make it look … more attractive? Less stressed out and belabored, more lighthearted and
leisurely? Less zany, more gay?
Feminism’s “aesthetic problem” (which is thus a problem in a double sense) is of course
the same one we first saw raised by, as well as in, one work of aesthetic theory in particular, The
Gay Science—a zany text in which the themes of distance, play, and pleasure also happen to
figure prominently. We have thus come full circle, to the very first place in which we began
thinking about this aesthetic category. For these reasons, I want to conclude this chapter by
turning its analysis back on zany style of The Gay Science itself. What I’ve tried to do up to now
is unpack the political content of this style; to show, by tracking zaniness as it has developed in
tandem with the capitalist mode of production, that the late 20th century version of this aesthetic
is about a very specific kind of work: namely affective, performative, once “feminine” but
increasingly gender-troubling work; work that blurs the traditional distinctions between
productive, unproductive, and reproductive work. What I want to do in the last section (which is
really just a coda) is to see how the content we have uncovered might illuminate the specifically
aesthetic question of The Gay Science’s own affective style. In doing so, I hope provide a final
answer to a question I raised at the very beginning, which is the question of what makes The Gay
Science so zany in the first place—what keeps it from actually exemplifying the kind of gaiety
Nietzsche so insistently calls for in it.
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Coda: Nietzsche’s Zany
One of The Gay Science’s briefest aphorisms is Work. It appears in the latter half of
Book Three, where the aphorisms suddenly get much shorter than usual—thus giving readers the
impression of rushing at them with an increased speed.
Work.—How close work and the worker are now even to the most leisurely of us!” (#188, p.
204).
This verbal pellet on what we might now call the “cable guy problem,” the modern worker’s
disquieting proximity to “the most leisurely of us,” is followed quickly by another bit on the
problem of “fun.”
Joyless.— A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy
skies for a whole household, and it is a miracle if there is not one person like that. Happiness
is not nearly so contagious a disease. Why?” (#239, p. 214).
Short as they are (or rather because of their shortness), these texts on the theme of unwanted
intimacy seem unusually crowded by the presence of just a single person: a worker and a joyless
person. Which brings us to an interesting question. Why are there so many more people in this
chapter? In contrast to the interesting and cute, something about tracking the affective, formal,
and political dynamics of zaniness into the present moment seems to have brought a multitude
into this essay. Let us take a moment to reflect on just how crowded our analysis has become, by
sorting the kinds of references to persons we’ve encountered into categories. Kathy Acker,
Thomas Pynchon, John Ashbery, Clarence Major, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Pryor, Hugo Ball,
Lucille Ball, Karen Finley, Sally Silvers, Adrian Piper, Linda Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
Laura Kipnis, Allen Kaprow, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.: historical individuals. Pulcinella,
Arlecchino, Roadrunner, Gil Blas, Lucy Ricardo, Jack Brown, Old Gregg, Bouvard, Pécuchet,
Alex Owens, etc: fictional individuals. Zanni, steelworker, odd-jobber, stripper, adulterer,
humorless feminist: social types and/or stereotypes. And finally, at once generic and particular,
historical and imaginary, and abstract and concrete, a bunch of allegorical zanies who seem to
inhabit a zone in between all three of these categories: the cable guy, the maniac, the housewife,
the toy.
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Now in a way it is hardly surprising that this aesthetic category should have gathered so
many people into it. In commedia dell’arte, the zany is zanni, an individual person. Yet there is a
sense in which there has never been just one zany even this context. Even before splitting into a
primo and secondo zanni, and then into zanni and zagne (and then Pulcinella, Trivellino,
Truffaldino, Arlecchino, Francatrippa, Brighella, Scapino, and so on), we arguably see the zany
pluralized and refracted across multiple subject positions. The zany is both a literary character
and a historical figure (the character of Pedrolino, the rural immigrant on which the figure of
Pedrolino was based). He is also a worker/performer on two levels simultaneously: a servant in
the diegetic world of the drama (the zany qua zanni); and as a professional performer in the
market or public sphere (the zany as a zany). The best explanation for why our analysis of the
zany has gathered so many people into it is thus that the zany not just an aesthetic of
performance but production: a process that today includes a variety of activities (reproductive,
sex-affective, immaterial, virtuosic, biopolitical) which are increasingly really as well as
formally subsumed by capital. Zaniness is in this sense always already an aesthetic of multitude.
This is perhaps best evinced in the virtuosity of post-Fordist zaniness, which encodes the
making-productive of affects and sociability in particular. Here zaniness especially becomes an
aesthetic about collective personhood, precisely as that personhood is being put to work (for
capital)
Now Nietzsche is famously interested not in production, but power. Yet is no less
surprising, if for different reasons, to find so many references to people in The Gay Science.
This is a text similarly crowded with historical figures (Homer, Beethoven, Kant, Wagner,
Luther, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Zola, Flaubert), fictional characters (Gil Blas, Hamlet, Brutus,
Baubo, Faust), but most of all, social types and/or stereotypes: actors, socialists, architects, state
idolaters, “good men,” Germans, Jews, vegetarians, diplomats, soldiers, Chinese, leaders,
Americans, servants, Buddhists, Christians, drunkards, ascetics, Asiatics, metaphysicians,
workers, employers, “great-souled men,” “scientific” women, “herd men”, joyless people, and so
on. Locatable in the overlap of all three categories is the text’s highly charismatic authorial
person, who is both a “character” and a highly self-conscious performer of character, as we saw
Wyndham Lewis suggest earlier, in his characterization of Nietzsche as “got up to represent a
Polish nobleman, with a berserker wildness in his eye.” If The Gay Science is a work by a
mountebank, as Lewis’s interestingly ambiguous characterization suggests (by implying that
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Nietzsche knows there to be an element of “fairground trickery”130 to his work and the kinds of
identification it solicits from his readers), who or what in it might be thought of as Nietzsche’s
zany?
Social types and/or stereotypes (I use “and/or” to highlight an unavoidable slipperiness
between the two poles) famously abound in all of Nietzsche’s writings. As Gilles Deleuze has
noted, his entire philosophical project is a kind of typology (34). Even those individuals
Nietzsche makes highly personal references to in The Gay Science, such as Wagner, are invoked
to represent historical tendencies or philosophical themes. The “characters” in The Gay
Science—if characters are indeed what these figures are—thus ironically seem to have, as their
most prominent characteristic, that of performing a philosophical function. Yet the particular
task Nietzsche most typically enlists his avatars in The Gay Science to do, is precisely that of
exemplifying a particular kind of affective subjectivity. This makes the exemplary persons in this
text (including, one could even argue, his own authorial persona) seem curiously de-subjectified
and highly subjectified at once: as if a cross between the task-oriented performers and the
“marvelously deranged beings” highlighted in Oldenburg and Kaprow’s differing approaches to
happenings. But it is clear that the types in The Gay Science are not all typical in the exact same
way (and this is hardly a surprise, given Nietzsche’s aversion to any sort of social leveling).
Indeed, in a way similar, but not exactly equivalent to, the competitive structure of the 19th
century novel’s character system described by Alex Woloch, one could say that there is a
division of allegorical “labor” in the text that is keyed to differences in the ideality and
particularity of his implied persons.131 Some of his figures seem to possess a greater degree of
historical concreteness than others (Zola, for instance, in contrast to “herd men”); others, a
greater degree of sociological or mythological reference (“herd men” compared to Baubo, Baubo
compared to Herbert Spencer.) We might say that some of Nietzsche’s performers in The Gay
Science are more “matrixed” than others, and this degree of enmeshment, in a particular
temporal, spatial, and subjective situation, seems to have some bearing on how much
philosophical “work” they are made to do.
I’m building here to a point that readers have probably long anticipated. For it been
repeatedly noted that the character who performs the most allegorical “service” in The Gay
Science is woman. Zola, herd men, Baubo, and Spencer all embody specific values in this text.
Woman, by contrast, is the one type in Nietzsche’s pantheon who seems capable of embodying
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numerous values, including ones that explicitly contradict one another. A more “flexible” avatar
in this sense (as well as a more generic, less historically matrixed one), woman seems moreover
uniquely available to represent any one of Nietzsche’s theories at any particular moment
throughout the text: whether it be that of radical epistemological instability, the proper
relationship between art and truth, or the concept of truth itself. So while the post-Fordist zany is
a kind of woman, woman in The Gay Science is Nietzsche’s zany—an “always mobile” figure
placed in a particularly intimate relation to the contingent and the unforeseen. On perpetual
standby, like the domestic worker often pressured to board with her employers for precisely this
reason, she is, or can be made to exemplify, any thing at any moment. In this elasticity, mobility,
and responsiveness, she “renders [Nietzsche] the possibility of movement in remaining, for him,
the persistence of his being. Truth or appearances, according to his desire of the moment, his
appetite of the instant. Truth and appearances and reality, power … she is—by virtue of her
inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry—the living support of all the staging/production of the world.
Variously veiled according to the epochs of history.”132 Woman’s self-sameness thus
dialectically resides in her “inexhaustible” aptitude to mimic others. Both characterized as a
virtuosic mimic, while ready to take on any exemplifying function at any moment, she is the
ultimate improvisational performer.
Woman is the ultimate improvisational performer—which would seem to make
Nietzsche’s concept of “performing,” feminine. It is thus no surprise that “aptitude for mimicry”
becomes an object of extremely mixed feelings in The Gay Science. Though acting is
enthusiastically praised at moments as the exact antithesis of a static, spectator-oriented,
“contemplative” art which Nietzsche wholeheartedly despises (see, for instance, aphorisms #99
and #301), we have already seen his ambivalence about performing in How things will be
become ever more artistic in Europe (#356), disquieted there by the similarity between the
actor’s willingness to self-experiment, and what Nietzsche calls the “role faith” of the modern
“American” worker (which turns that industrial-capitalist worker into a performing “artist” of
sorts). In a later aphorism, On the problem of the actor, Nietzsche hesitates once again on this
issue, though more specifically disquieted in this case by an overlap between the instincts of the
virtuosic performer and those possessed by Jews, diplomats, academics, and women.
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The problem of the actor has troubled me for the longest time. I felt unsure (and
sometimes still do) whether it is not only from this angle that one can get at the dangerous
concept of the ‘artist’—a concept so far treated with unpardonable generosity. Falseness
with a good conscience; the delight in simulation exploding as a power that pushes aside
one’s so-called ‘character,’ flooding it and at times extinguishing it; the inner craving for a
role and mask, for appearance; an excess of the capacity for all kinds of adaptations that
can no longer be satisfied in the service of the most immediate and narrowest utility—all
of this is perhaps not only peculiar to the actor? (316).
In a relatively rare moment, Nietzsche’s sudden urge to distance himself from the “artist” is here
reflected in his punctuation, as Derrida has helped us notice,133 with a long dash used to thrust
this seductive concept away: “[T]he dangerous concept of the ‘artist’—a concept so far treated
with unpardonable generosity.” For the capacities of the performing artist which Nietzsche
admires most—ability to adjust quickly to unpredictable situations; will to mimicry or
impersonation; “craving for appearance,” delight in falseness and illusion—are shared by other
types for whom these very same aptitudes serve base utilitarian ends: “[It] really is high time to
ask: What good actor today is not—a Jew? The Jew as a born ‘man of letters,’ as the true master
of the European press, also exercises his power by virtue of his histrionic gifts; for the man of
letters is essentially an actor: He plays the ‘expert,’ the ‘specialist’” (317). Next, famously:
“Reflect on the whole history of women: do they not have to be first of all and above all
actresses? Listen to physicians who have hypnotized women; finally, love them—let yourself by
“hypnotized by them.” What is always the end result? That they “put on something” even when
they take off everything.” “That Jews and women should be thus associated [by their “histrionic
gifts”] does not seem at all insignificant,” Derrida says in Spurs (69). I couldn’t agree more..
But if one takes a closer look at On the problem of the actor, we can see how the link between
women and these “men of letters” is immediately prepared by another avatar whom Derrida does
not mention, which is that of the servant.
The very first thing Nietzsche says about the “instinct of adaptability” in this aphorism is
that it is one which “will have developed most easily in families of the lower classes who have
had to survive under changing pressures and coercions, in deep dependency … always adapting
themselves again to new circumstances, who always had to change their mien and posture, until
they learned gradually to turn their coat to every wind and thus virtually to become a coat” (316).
With the image of a “coat” that one “becomes” suggesting a uniform or livery, Nietzsche hints
that it is the servant who in fact genealogically gives rise to the actor. When “accumulated from
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generation to generation,” this “lower-class” worker’s instinct for wearing a mask, for quickly
adapting and reacting to any situation becomes, like the American worker’s “role faith,”
“domineering, unreasonable, and intractable”
domineering, unreasonable, and intractable, an instinct that learns to lord it over the other
instincts, and generates the actor, the ‘artist’ (the zany, the teller of lies, the buffoon, fool,
clown at first, as well as that classical servant, Gil Blas; for it is in such types that we find the
pre-history of the artist and often enough even of the ‘genius’).”134
Though my underlining is intended to highlight the fact that there is an actual “zany” in The Gay
Science, this is not my main reason for citing this passage. Note that it consists of a single, long
and grammatically irregular sentence, which takes up the entire second paragraph of the
aphorism. And note the strange looping movement of this unusually long sentence on the
worker-as-actor. What is being claimed here is that the hardening of the servant’s instinct for
adapting over generations (à la Larmarck) eventually gives rise to the type of the actor. But in
the parenthesis that immediately follows, “actor” slides quickly back into meaning “servant.”
This slide takes place down a chromatic scale of types associated in varying degrees with the
theatre, and marked thus by intermediate mixtures of servility and virtuosity. In the implied
spectrum of positions between “artist” and “servant,” lies the zany, teller of lies, buffoon, fool,
clown:
the actor, the ‘artist’ (the zany, the teller of lies, the buffoon, fool, clown at first, as well as
that classical servant, Gil Blas…
But even here, things are not done yet. For even after “actor” has metonymically “degenerated”
(by these intermediary stages) into “servant,” we are told once again, before the closing of the
parenthesis, that it is precisely the servant, exemplified in Gil Blas, the zany protagonist of
Lesage’s early 18th century novel, who is the progenitor of the artist:
that classical servant, Gil Blas; for it is in such types that we find the pre-history of the
artist and often enough even of the ‘genius’).
The point of this back and forth, from the image of servility to that of virtuosity, to servility and
that again of virtuosity, seems to be a demonstration of the present interchangeability of “artist”
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and “servant,” even while it is being argued that one historically gives rise to the other. And at
the center of the chiasmus indexing this interchangeability, is “the zany.”
The “lower-class” worker who performs services is thus like “the zany,” and as such is
like Nietzsche’s other zany/performer in The Gay Science: woman. Indeed, the image of the
servant as a “coat” worn against a blowing wind (Book Five) echoes one of Nietzsche’s most
famous images of the feminine mystique in Book Two: the wind-filled “white sails” of the
sailboat in Women and their action at a distance. “Woman” is not only the topical subject of this
aphorism, but a character enlisted to work an aesthetic contrast he is trying to draw in it, as a
designer hires a model to “work” a piece of fashion. This is the contrast between a subjective
state of frenzy, in which the male philosopher finds himself overwhelmed by the “noise” of life,
and a contemplative aesthetic of “deathly quiet,” a state in which, instead of embracing’s one’s
“surf of plans and projects,” one “moves over” that existence serenely (and disinterestedly).
All great noise leads us to move happiness into some quiet distance. When a man stands in
the midst of his own noise, in the midst of his own surf of plans and projects, then he is apt to
see quiet, magical beings gliding past him and to long for their happiness and seclusion:
women. He almost thinks that his better self dwells there among the women, and that in
these quiet regions even the loudest surf turns into deathly quiet, and life itself into a dream
about life. Yet! Yet! Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat there is a lot of
noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise. The magic and the most powerful
effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, action in distans; but this
requires first of all and above all—distance.
The aesthetic values contrasted here can be easily slotted into one of Nietzsche’s many
hierarchies, with the man’s “surf of plans and projects” on the side of life-affirming, active force;
and women’s “quiet” on the side of life-denying, reactive force. And unlike the man’s “noise,”
which is real, woman’s “quiet” is unambiguously a dissimulation: “Even on the most beautiful
sailboat there is a lot of noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise.”
What is ambiguous, particularly when we compare this aphorism to others in which
Nietzsche’s zany gets praised for her “artistic” ability to produce illusions, is what the woman’s
exact relationship to “quiet” is. Did she produce this effect to attract the male philosopher type
(and thus feminize him)? This ambiguity about whether woman’s dissembling is conscious or
unconscious—and thus about whether her disinterested “quiet” counts as an “artistic” production
or not—is clearly related to her very elasticity as an example throughout The Gay Science, and
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especially in Nietzsche’s discussions of art and truth. At times “woman” represents what
Nietzsche values as the best attitude toward “truth”: a stance of amused indifference which real
women as virtuosic performers would also seem to share: “They consider the superficiality of
existence to be its essence, and all virtue and profundity is for them merely a veiling of this
‘truth.’” But at other times, “woman” functions as a metaphor for truth itself, the seductively
veiled or “distanced” thing which philosophers fervently want to “grasp” or “attain.” In this
sense, “woman” is both distanced from truth (in adopting the proper attitude of indifference
towards truth) and lacking distance from “truth” (she is truth).
Whether woman is on or not on the side of truth, truth in The Gay Science is always the
opposite side as art. The question of whether Nietzsche regards his zany as genuinely artistic
thus remains. For even when The Gay Science is explicit in praising woman’s indifference to
“truth,” this admiration needs to be immediately read against its repeated denigrations of
“feminine” aesthetics, with Wagner, Flaubert, Zola and others held responsible for the
“feminizing of modernity.” In his careful analysis of this “twisting and turning from the feminine
to the masculine” in Nietzsche’s confrontation with the aesthetic tradition, Matthew Rampley
suggests that inconsistencies like these result from the fact that sexual difference is being
deployed “strategically,” with “masculine” denoting an aesthetics from the “active” standpoint of
the artist (a “giver”) and “feminine” denoting an aesthetics from the “passive” standpoint of the
spectator (a “receiver”). In a manner that recalls the controversial distinction between productive
and unproductive or reproductive labor, as challenged by feminists as well as by many of our
zany texts above, “Nietzsche is here ‘dealing with a very old philosopheme of production,’
whereby masculinity has always has always been regarded as the productive gender against the
sterility of the feminine” (211). Yet even according to this reading, confusions remain. For
while there are other aphorisms in which “woman” is expressly credited as producer of her
various aesthetic effects, in Action at a distance it still remains unclear whether “quiet” is an
illusion woman consciously creates, or an illusion the man has unconsciously created and
projected onto her.
For Doane, “Her dissembling is not a conscious strategy. She has no knowledge of it or
access to it as an operation. And this unconsciousness of the woman, her blindness to her own
work, is absolutely necessary in order to allow and maintain [Nietzsche’s] idealization of her”
(59). Doane’s claim is not based on The Gay Science, however, where the question does remain,
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I think, ambiguous. It is rather based on the following moment from the notebooks
posthumously published as The Will to Power, where Nietzsche does seem quite explicit on the
issue. And yet, if we take a closer look of the passage, it becomes clear that women’s
dissembling is at once unconscious, and deliberate.
Given the tremendous subtlety of woman’s instinct, modesty remains by no means conscious
hypocrisy: she divines that it is precisely an actual naïve modesty that most seduces a man
and impels him to overestimate her. Therefore woman is naïve—from the subtlety of her
instinct, which advises her of the utility of innocence. A deliberate closing of one’s eyes to
oneself—Wherever dissembling produces a stronger effect when it is unconscious, it
becomes unconscious.
“Wherever dissembling produces a stronger effect when it is unconscious, it becomes
unconscious.” Note how nearly identical this statement is to Nietzsche’s discussion of “role
faith” in The Gay Science: “Whenever a human being begins to discover how he is playing a role
and how he can become an actor, he becomes an actor.”
We are thus brought back again to a convergence between the zany “American” worker
and woman—a convergence based on a shared relation or approach to performing. As figures
that trouble Nietzsche’s admiration for role playing in the exact same way, the specific
alignment between “worker” and “woman” in The Gay Science is perhaps one explanation for
the conspicuously mixed affect of his own aesthetic treatise—for why his text seems zany, not
gay. Both zanies raise the problem of aesthetic “distance” for Nietzsche: woman, by raising the
question of her ability to separate herself from her own aesthetic effects; the worker by lacking
separation between his self and his role (or “coat”). Both raise the question of whether
performing counts as virtuosity or servility, leisure or labor; whether it exemplifies an art
lightheartedly indifferent to truth, or a kind of frenzied “role faith” demanded by the spirit of
capitalism. Explicitly inflected with gender (and sometimes race and religion) throughout The
Gay Science, it is easy to see how these questions funnel directly into the issue of the book’s own
affective tonality, as brought out by the very aggressiveness of Nietzsche’s denunciation of those
too frenzied by work to be lighthearted in Leisure and idleness: “How frugal our educated—and
uneducated—people have become regarding ‘joy’! How they are becoming increasingly
suspicious of all joy! More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for
joy already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is beginning to be ashamed of itself.” Thus
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explicitly linking “suspicion of joy” to the “breathless haste with which [Americans] work—the
distinctive vice of the new world,” which is “already beginning to infect old Europe with its
ferocity,” Nietzsche continues,
Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad
conscience. One thinks with a watch in his hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal
while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always ‘might miss
out on something.’ ‘Rather do anything than nothing’: this principle, too, is merely a rope
to strangle all culture and good taste. Just as all forms are visibly perishing by the haste of
the workers, the feeling for form itself, the ear and eye for the melody of movements are
also perishing” (259).
This passage on zaniness of modern workers illuminates an aspect of the pathos of zaniness that
we have not yet considered: which is that is an aesthetic of action paradoxically about the
etiolation of our capacity to recognize action as an aesthetic form. Under a historical mode of
production that appropriates and subsumes an increasingly wide range of processes and
production arrangements for the extrapolation of surplus value (including household and sexaffective activities that were once seen as unproductive or non-economic), zaniness is an
aesthetic that paradoxically indexes the vitiation of aesthetic experience; a vitiation specifically
caused by the “haste of the workers” described by Nietzsche above. Zaniness is an aesthetic of
rapid or frantic movement that points to the stunting of our ability to perceive the “form” or
“melody” of movement. Postindustrial zaniness, by this logic, is not just an aesthetic about the
shrinking distinction between work and leisure; it is an aesthetic about the extinction of a specific
capacity for aesthetic perception caused precisely by this transformation in our relationship to
work. Zaniness is an aesthetic about the loss of a specific kind of relationship to the aesthetic in
general. Of course the zany can never be truly lighthearted, then. How can an aesthetic about
the vitiation of the aesthetic be gay? And why can’t The Gay Science be gay? All in all, the
strained quality of this work of aesthetic theory stems finally from Nietzsche’s uncertainty about
whether “performing” finally counts as work or play—an uncertainty about whether
“performing” is artistic which he ironically relies on two “characters,” woman and the worker, to
dramatize or perform for us. In this sense, the zany affect of The Gay Science can be attributed
directly to the dramatized presence of the zanies in it; and its style to a particular aspect of its
76
content: the ambiguous aesthetic status of “performance” under conditions of modern
production, as exemplified in a particularly unique way by women and workers.
More specially, the “erratic and overheated” tone of The Gay Science could also be read
as reflecting a disquieting awareness, on the part of its author, of a new and increasingly
pervasive relationship to labor which would seem to throw the prestigious concept of “play” and
its specific centrality to art into question. Praised for its associations with freedom, autonomy,
spontaneity, non-instrumentality, and pleasure—associations which place it at the root of the
beautiful for Kant, in the form of a “free play” between the understanding and imagination—
“playing” is a philosopheme that even Nietzsche, for all his radical commitment to the
reevaluation of all values (and Kantian ones especially), is strikingly reluctant to give up.
Purposeless, excessive, and exuberant, the vital impulse for play would seem to be the surefire
guarantee of a lighthearted art. As Nietzsche notes in The Will to Power: “Play: the useless—as
the ideal of him who is overfull of strength, as ‘childlike.’ The ‘childlikeness’ of God playing,
pais paizon.”135 But can Spiel still serve this function in a world like the one Nietzsche is
describing in The Gay Science? If role playing is now role faith, and improvisation adopted for
utilitarian ends, how can the instinct for play still remain truly “childlike” or unharnessed to
utility, or remain the foundation for an aesthetics defined in these terms? For Schiller, and later
Dewey, Spieltrieb was the solution to reunifying human faculties divided by the increasingly
differentiated and fragmented society of industrial modernity. But what is the aesthetic status of
Spieltrieb in the society depicted in The Cable Guy, The Toy, and The Full Monty, where
alienation no longer seems to stem as much from the specialization and isolation of human
capacities for action, than from radical generalization of “performance” across society as a
whole? Like the sudden surge of brightness of a light bulb which indicates that it is soon to go
out, zaniness’s fever-pitch devotion to playfulness in our current moment points to a ongoing
erosion of the very meaningfulness of play for aesthetics under late capitalism, with its
repositioning of play inside work. Here we have yet another reason why zaniness can’t be truly
lighthearted; because it is an aesthetic that indexes the vitiation of a philosopheme so central to
the western aesthetic tradition that even Nietzsche can’t seem to gaily leave it behind.
A direct cause of its author’s “beset” affect, the “problem of the actor “in The Gay
Science is finally the problem of a performer at a historical moment in which, under specific
relations of production, the relationships of performance to play, and of play to aesthetic
77
freedom, have both become uncertain. The “problem of the actor” is thus the problem of the
zany, who in The Gay Science has two faces: that of a woman and a worker. Both in turn
embody the problem of distances, the vanishing distinction between work and play, and the
unfunness of “fun.” If these problems are indeed reasons for a specifically feminist interest in
“zany science,” I would argue that they become even more so now that the “feminization” of
labor under our current mode of production has made them relevant to everyone.
Notes (**not finished yet**)
1
Claes Oldenburg, “A Statement,” in Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Michael Kirby
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965), 200.
2
Gas was a collaboration between Allan Kaprow, sculptor Charles Frazier, and CBS producer
Gordon Hyatt, staged in Southampton, New York. Kurt Schwitters, The Dada Painters and
Poets (New York: Wittenborn, Schuiltz Inc., 1951), 62-63. Schwitters’s quote is cited in Kirby,
“Introduction,” 23.
3
Kirby, “Introduction,” 16.
4
Kirby, “Introduction,” 16.
5
On the disjunction between Kaprow’s description of his happenings in his writings (as “crude,
lyrical, and spontaneous”), and his actual happenings, which were more in the vein of a “Cagean
researcher than an aggrieved Beat poet,” see Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 45.
6
Alan Kaprow, “Untitled Essay,” from Untitled Essay and Other Works (New York: Something
Else Press, 1967), 5. Reprinted online at http://www.ubu.com/historical/kaprow/index.html.
7
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), 37.
8
See Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006), 105. As Galloway notes, in the case of video games, the other agents
include the machine.
78
9
“Each aphorism is set up as an experiment to be tested, observed, and, at times, rescinded.”
See Avital Ronell, “The Test Drive,” in Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the
Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: NYU Press, 1995), 200-222. Though for an
opposing view, see Walter Kaufmann, “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Gay Science, 1-26.
10
Jon McKenzie explicitly links this experience of being challenged to performance in general in
his Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001).
11
I am echoing Paolo Virno in his gloss of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the political. See Paolo
Virno, A Grammar of The Multitude, trans. Isabela Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea
Casson (Semiotext[e], 2004), 51.
13
Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” in Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire
Bishop (London: Whitechapel, 2006), 190-195, 194. First published as ‘Arty Party,’ London
Review of Books (London, 4 December 2004) 21-2.
14
Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New
York: Da Capo, 2000), 117.
15
F.T. Marinetti, cited in RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 14.
16
Wolf Vostell, quoted by Allan Kaprow in Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings
(1966). Cited in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000), 97.
17
Publisher’s Weekly, 1986. TK.
18
On Valeska Gert, see Susan Allene Manning and Melissa Benson, “Interrupted Continuities:
Modern Dance in Germany” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, eds.
Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 218-227, 227. “Funny and unsettling”: Joan Acocella,
“Critic’s Notebook: New Tradition,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2008. URL =
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2008/03/10/080310gonb_GOAT_notebook_aco
cella. “Wild child”: Deborah Jowitt, “It's All Choreography.” Village Voice, June 22nd, 2004.
19
This expression, the “neighborhood” of the performative, is from Eve Sedgwick’s great essay,
“Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative,” in
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp.
67-92.
20
See http://www.sudor.net/games/crosser_lamigra/index.html. I learned about this game from
reading Rita Raley.
21
Rita Raley, “Border Hacks: The Risks of Tactical Media,” in Risk and the War on Terror, eds.
Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (New York: Routledge, 2008). I am citing from a book
ms of this article, p. 21.
79
22
Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, “bio-tek kitchen.” See http://lx.sysx.org/?page_id=11.
“Slightly maniacal home cook”: see Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” in Art
After Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann (Cambridge, Mass., MIT
Press, 2006), 67-86, 79.
23
Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (Black Sparrow Press, 1989) p. 113. Cited in
Malcolm Bull, “Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?” New Left Review 3 (May-Jun 2000): 121-145, p.
125.
24
Peter Brooks, Henry James in Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), TK.
25
Forced Entertaiment, “Bloody Mess.” See http://www.forcedentertainment.com/?lid=2. Also
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kORONJwf9Y8.
26
“Fun,” Oxford English Dictionary. TK.
27
Oxford English Dictionary online, TK.
28
See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808279/.
29
Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992),
92. There is a little reflexive allegory of this problem condensed in Nietzsche’s own description
of his work, in the subtitle of his Twilight of the Idols, as “doing philosophy with a hammer.”
Though by Hammer, as Walter Kaufmann explains, Nietzsche is referring to a tuning fork one
strikes lightly to test the tone of another instrument (that is, a tool associated with what
performance studies scholars would call a musical “pre-performance”), there is a tendency on the
part of the Anglo-American reader to read “hammer” as sledgehammer (something we certainly
don’t associate with lightness or music but with heaviness and hard manual work). See Walter
Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978), p. 112.
30
See Bull, “Where is the Anti-Nietzsche?” p. 125.
31
We might say that zany “blocks” gaiety (and vice versa), in the same way “la migra” in
Fajardo’s game block “crossers” with their cars. On this “blocking” capacity of the passions as a
structural feature of the passions, see Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2002), TK.
32
“Even in Beckett's plays, the curtain rises the way it rises on the room with the Christmas
presents.” See Theodor W. Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature Volume Two,
trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 247-256, p. 248. Though we
might conclude that it is the threat of injury that lies behind zaniness’s unhappy affect, the fact
that violence has always been an essential features of Beckett’s work makes it unsatisfying as an
explanation for why the zany lacks the kind of optimism that Adorno is using Beckett’s drama to
80
exemplify. And while the implication of madness or hysteria in our contemporary understanding
of “zany” may seem like an even more obvious reason for what Harris calls its “maniacal edge,”
this explanation seems too entirely psychological. (The word “zany” does not derive
etymologically from “insanity”; nor “insanity” from “zany.” Their graphemic and phonemic
resemblance are coincidental.)
33
Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77.
34
See Raymond Queneau, “Preface” in Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. Mark
Polizzotti (New York, Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), xxi. “Fortunately, they had Dumochel’s
mnemonic, a duodecimo volume bearing the epigraph: ‘Fun while learning’.” See 106.
35
“Southwest. Way Southwest. An Airline Success Story Tries to Keep its Inner Quirk.” The
New York Times, Business Section (Wednesday, February 13, 2008): 1, 10.
36
In a footnote to the fourth German edition of Marx’s Capital, Engels writes: The English
language has the advantage of possessing two separate words for … two different aspects of
labour. Labour which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined is called ‘work’ instead
of ‘labour’; labour which creates value and is only measured quantitatively is called ‘labour,’ as
opposed to ‘work’” (138). Translator Ben Fowkes adds, “Unfortunately, English usage does not
always correspond to Engels’ distinction.” Like Fowkes himself, however, I have also tried to
adopt it wherever possible; though it is a crucial argument of this essay that contemporary
zaniness reflects a situation where all work (including what Marx would call “unproductive”
work) is increasingly subsumed as labor by capital. Work, labor, and production are at times thus
used synonymously in this paper, but always self-consciously. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976).
37
Animal and other non-human zanies are, of course, anthropomorphized.
38
“Zany” is moreover the only aesthetic term I can think of which can still be used as both a
noun and adjective. See Horace Walpole, “Letter to the Hon. H.S. Conway (October 6 1785),”
in The Letters of Horace Walpole: Earl of Orford: including numerous letters now first published
from the original manuscripts, vol. 4 (Lea and Blanchard, 1842), 379. Thanks to Franco Moretti
for this zany sighting.
39
See Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-847;
and Ngai, “Merely Interesting,” Critical Inquiry TK (Summer 2008), forthcoming.
40
Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia Dell’Arte (Cambridge UK,
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 23.
41
Oxford English Dictionary online.
42
Henke, Performance and Literature, p. 27.
81
43
Antonio Fava, The Comic Mask in the Commedia dell’Arte: Actor Training, Improvisation,
and the Poetics of Survival, trans. Thomas Simpson (Evanston, Illinois; Northwestern Univeristy
Press, 2007), p. 56.
44
Kunin’s account of character as a collection of examples across time is, as he notes, an
“idealist” account of character: “Character is the formal device that makes it possible for the
members of collective to assemble, for the miser to be not more than one miser, but all misers.”
Aaron Kunin, “Characters Lounge,” unpublished ms., 11. Cited with permission of author. The
downside to the idealist account (which Kunin argues “proposes a more just social organization”
than Woloch’s realist account) is that it can’t explain why some characters are obviously more
prone to collecting examples than others; why some characters stay more in the popular
imagination than others and why others drop out. Certainly commedia dell’arte’s Doctor and
Captain characters never inspired songs and poems in the same way as zanni.
45
Henke, Performance and Literature, p. 129.
46
I’m indebted forever to Eric Hayot for introducing me to Old Gregg.
47
This way of seeing Old Gregg (and the cable guy) was suggested to me by Seth Lerer, as we
were both on our way to teach literature classes.
48
Virno, A Grammar of The Multitude, TK.
49
Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York, Routledge, 2004), 4.
50
Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 5.
51
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University
Press, 1990), TK.
52
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commericalization of Human Feeling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 38-48.
53
But perhaps the “cheerfulness” of the flight attendant in particular, as Giddens’s strangely
redundant use of “stereotyped” here suggests. Given that all are equally “put on,” why would a
flight attendant’s affective display or mask be any more “stereotypical” than that of a doctor or
judge?
54
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” trans. Edward A. Shils, in On Individuality
and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324-329.
Reprinted from Social Sciences III Selections and Selected Readings, vol. 2. 14th ed. (University
of Chicago Press, 1948).
82
55
In spite of his being cable technology’s ostensive agent or representative, this is just one of
many ways in the cable guy’s actions seems surprisingly anti-television, or aimed against the
medium’s purported anti-sociality.
56
Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 63,
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 2000): 33-58. ( Reprinted in Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for
the Information Age (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Books, 2004), 73-97.)
57
Roger Callois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2001), 11-35. Georg Simmel, “Sociability,” in Individuality and Social Forms,
127-140.
58
Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 163.
59
See McKenzie, Perform or Else, 137-174.
60
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2006), p. 62.
61
Mauricio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed.
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, trans. Maurizia Boscagli, Cesare Cesarino, Paul Colilli, Ed
Emory, Michael Hardt, and Michael Turits (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
133-150, 133.
62
See Arlie Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work
(New York, Henry Holt, 1997), 204-205.
63
Here capitalism starts to explicitly valorize (and thus include as part of the production process)
what Marx already saw as a key part of the relations of production, its objectively social
character. See Capital, Vol 1 (Penguin), TK.
64
Terranova, “Free Labor,” 37.
65
At the same time, the integration of production and consumption in immaterial labor
simultaneously poses a problem of legitimacy for the capitalist appropriation of this process,
since it “deals with the very life of society.” Crediting Bakhtin as one of the first to “[define]
immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between ‘material labor and intellectual
labor,’” as well as to demonstrate how “creativity is a social process,” Lazzarato elaborates,
“‘Economics’ can only appropriate the forms and products of this cooperation, normalizing and
standardizing them. The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that
only the forms of life produce.” See Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 146.
66
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOyQK5jBalE.
83
67
Though this is in some ways typical of all postwar advertising (where featuring the marketing
of a product over the product itself has long been the norm), there is an extra, specifically postFordist twist here: insofar as the commercial works, it will pique our interest in the car not just
for the particular way in which the seller is selling it to us, but because it represents a seller who
is clearly a virtuoso at selling. What appeals to us is the zany’s virtuosic display of his own skill
as a performer.
68
Queneau, “Preface,” Bouvard and Pecuchet, xxi.
69
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
(Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 2004), 47.
70
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Paris, les
presses du reel, 2002), 28.
71
See Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 14, 70.
72
See Linda Montano, Art in Everyday Life (Astro Artz/Station Hill, 1981), no page numbers.
73
Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” 192.
74
Gabriel Orozco, quoted in Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” p. 192.
75
This is crucially where also Marx also discusses the idea of the “collective” or “aggregate
worker,” and makes clear that the concept of “productive” labor refers specifically to the
“collective laborer considered as a whole,” and not for “each member taken individually.” See
“Results of the Immediate Process of Production” in Marx, Capital, 948-1084. As Harry
Cleaver suggests, this notion of productivity, as grounded in the social totality, works against a
“phlogiston theory of value”—one that sees the value of a commodity as based on the labor time
of the individual worker who works on it—that underpins “politically dangerous” efforts to
distinguish “real” workers from “unproductive workers.” See Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital
Politically (Leeds, UK: AK Press, 2000), 118-119.
77
Karl Marx, Capital, TK. Cited in Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, 120.
78
Feliz Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethicoaestheic Paradigm, trans. Julian Pefanis (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), 88; cited in Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 103.
79
See Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Culturas-in-extremis: Performing against the cultural backdrop
of the mainstream bizarre,” in Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 45-64. “Just switch on Jerry Springer” is from the back cover.
80
See also Bourriaud, p. 9, p. 113.
84
81
See McKenzie, Perform or Else, pp. 55-94, p. 69, 93. Hochschild discusses the same
phenomenon in The Time Bind, 203-209. See also Liu, 77.
82
Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” in Art After Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander
Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2006), 67-86, 72 fn.22.
83
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For An Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life,
trans, Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson (New York, Semiotext[e], 2004), 52,
84
Michael Hardt and Antonion Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
(New York: Penguin, 2004), 111.
85
There has certainly been increasing attention to and discussion of the overlap by feminists.
See for instance Kathi Weeks, “Subject for a Feminist Standpoint,” in Marxism After Marxism,
ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (New York: Routledge, 1996), 89-118;
and Antonella Corsani (below). Perhaps the lack of a more systematically theorized account
(until now) of the relationship between the concept of immaterial and/or virtuosic labor, as
developed by the radical left in Italy, and the concept of “women’s work” as reproductive labor,
as developed by feminists in the U.S. and Europe at the same time, is due to the specific history
of these two movements, which according to Michael Hardt, “seldom enjoyed much contact and
were at times antagonistic towards each other.” Hardt notes this in the very first footnote to his
introduction to Radical Thought in Italy, which comes at the end of the sentence, “It will be
necessary … in the course of this volume, to give some indications of the nature of political
movements in Italy over the past thirty years” [p. 2]). In the footnote, Hardt writes, “During the
same period there developed an original and powerful tradition of feminist theory in Italy….
There are aspects that this feminist tradition shares with the tradition presented in this volume, in
particular the focus on autonomy and the construct of alternative social structures, but in practice
the movements seldom enjoyed much contact and were at time antagonistic toward one another.”
See Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy, p. 10, fn. 1. Note that a
focus on “unproductive” or affective and/or reproductive labor is surprisingly not mentioned as
common ground between the two movements, only a “focus on autonomy and the construct of
alternative social structures.” I am not pointing this out to chastise Hardt and Virno for
marginalizing the feminist tradition in their introduction to “radical thought in Italy over the past
thirty years.” You can’t include everything in an anthology, and Radical Thought in Italy is a
good anthology. I point it out rather as an example of an expert on the history of politics in Italy
noting a historical disconnection between the two movements, that may explain why there often
seems to be disconnection between the two theories of labor as well.
86
Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Introduction,” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids,
and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 1-14. As the authors
notes, “The First World takes on a role like the old-fashioned male in the family—pampered,
entitled, unable to cook, clean or find his socks. Poor countries take on a role like that of the
traditional woman within the family—patient, nurturing, and self-denying.”
87
Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 154.
85
88
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “The Care Crisis in the Philipines: Children and Transnational
Families in the New Global Economy, in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, pp. 39-54.
90
Althusser and Balibar, for instance, who as Tom Bottomore notes, in Reading Capital widen
Marx’s original category of reproduction to include ideological and political as well as economic
levels, arguing that “all have to reproduced so that the structured totality which is the mode of
production can be reproduced.” See “Reproduction,” in Tom Bottomore, ed. Dictionary of
Marxist Thought, 2nd ed (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 470.
91
Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically
Feminist Historical Materialism,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda
Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 216-240.
92
Linda Nicholson, “Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic,” in The
Second-Wave Reader, 131-146, TK. [Where is this? Maybe not this one?]
94
Note, however, that the increasing privileging of “feminine” competences in the workplace by
no means entails that women will be rewarded over for men for possessing them! According to a
series of academic and professional studies reported in 2007 in the New York Times, while the
kinds of skills valued in the workplace vary from region to region, with skills such as “inspiring
others” valued most in the U.S. and England and “delegating tasks” valued most in Norway,
women were seen as lacking behind men in whatever skill was most valued, regardless of its
feminine or masculine inflection. See “The Feminine Critique,” by Lisa Belkin, New York
Times.com, Styles section, November 1, 2007. URL =
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/fashion/01WORK.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Women+Work&
st=nyt&oref=slogin
95
Antonella Corsani, “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)
Marxism.” SubStance 112, Vol 36, No. 1 (2007): 107-138.
96
“Sorry Boys, This is Our Domain.” Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times, Thursday
February 21, 2008 (E1 and E8).
98
See Walter Kaufmann, fn. 8, The Gay Science, 38.
99
Laura Kipnis, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (New York: Pantheon, 2006),
31.
100
If it’s anger about the becoming-woman of labor that the zaniness of the cable guy, toy,
maniac, and Old Gregg encodes, it is interestingly an anger that does not seem particularly
directed at women.
86
101
See Corsani, “Beyond the Myth of Woman,” 126. This echoes Hochschild’s less hypotactical
claim about how “ways in which feelings are dealt with in the family” are “exported” beyond it.
See The Managed Heart, TK.
102
This would explain why the film found it necessary to make Alex a steel factory worker as
well as an exotic dancer. Why complicate the simple upward mobility romance by bringing in
the extra or third theme of industrial labor—why not keep things simple and just tell the story of
an working class dancer who “bravely fights her way off the stripper pole” into a posh ballet
school? Because for all its Cinderella elements, I think the film engages in a much more
interesting meditation on the relationship between sex-affective and virtuosic labor, and the
social distinctions reinforced by the distinctions between pole dancing (sex work), ballet
(cultural work), and sexy but “artistic” flashdance (a mixture of both?) What the chronotope of
the steel industry, with its distinctively masculine iconography, adds to this already interesting
reflection on the relationship between three kinds of distinctively feminine performing
(striptease, exotic dance, classical ballet), is clearly intensified pressure on the question of that
labor’s gender.
103
Yet almost unintentionally, due to the fact that the film was shot on location, Flashdance also
gives us plenty of ill-omened glimpses of Pittsburgh as an industrial wasteland, including unused
railways and a portentously closed steel mill right across town.
104
Full Monty was originally put out as a limited release in the UK, but eventually surpassed
Jurassic Park to become the highest grossing film in British history.
105
Also surviving the loss of the steel factory, and continuing to perform after its demise, is its
brass band.
106
The other difference is that while Alex’s process of “becoming-woman” is handled with
seriousness, The Full Monty treats the same process with pathos but also humor, as we see the
unfortunately named Horse struggle desperately with a broken penis pump in a telephone booth,
in a panicked effort to improve his physique before his performance, and chubby Dave wrapping
his midsection with Saran wrap to produce a makeshift girdle while nervously eating a chocolate
bar. In earlier scene, Dave is told by one of his colleagues “fat is a feminist issue.”
107
See Tom Watson, I Love Lucy: The Classic Moments (Philadelphia: Courage Books, 1999).
Stars making these cameo appearances included Betty Grable, Tallulah Bankhead, Rudy Vallee,
Orson Welles, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Ernie Kovacs, Ida Lupino, Richard Widmark, Red
Skelton, Maurice Chevalier, Fred McMurray, and many others.
108
Karen Finley, Living It Up: Adventures in Hyperdomesticity (New York: Doubleday, 1996),
inside cover matter (no page numbers).
109
Corsani, “Beyond the Myth of Woman,” 108.
87
110
It’s a hope I hold onto myself; some might call it the utopian side of professionalism. (For the
darker, exploitative side, see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital [1974], Michael
Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent [1982], Liu, The Laws of Cool, Andrew Hoberek, The
Twilight of the Middle Class [2005], and many others: TK). Note that in problematizing the
postindustrial convergence of play and work in this essay, I’m not arguing work and play should
be MORE rigidly compartmentalized. Nor am I saying that having a job that one puts one’s
emotions into is necessarily bad. It can be very good. I do, however, want to make sure that one
has a critical perspective on the phenomenon as well, given the self-satisfied rhetoric of so much
“Performance Management.”
111
Though this nurturing or sex-affective work is increasingly market work, increasingly
outsourced by women in highly developed nations to immigrant workers, the fact that it is still
work performed in isolation from other workers in a family or household makes it highly
ambiguous with respect to whether it takes place in private or public.
113
Gender is an issue for the zany precisely because it is an aesthetic about work: an activity
organized and informed by changing concepts of sexual difference, if in different ways and to
different degrees under different modes of production.
114
See Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of this concept in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,
or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” in Touching Feeling,
123-151.
115
Many of my academic contemporaries now think we focus too much on culture, not enough
on economics (even though we are not economists; we are literary critics). Yet changing
cultural views of gender, mediating and mediated by changing structures of kinship and family
organization, have had direct political and economic effects, as well as the “merely” cultural
ones, on the conditions of capitalist production over the centuries: from affecting the value of
socially necessary labor time and therefore the price of wages (economic consequences); to
spurring progressive and anti-progressive legislation, from the nineteenth-century family wage to
contemporary paternity leave policies (political consequences); to determining the level of
prestige or cultural capital associated with particular kinds of competences or skills (cultural
consequences).
116
All these debates are nicely summed by Ann Ferguson, "Feminist Perspectives on Class and
Work", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/feminism-class/>.
117
Michéle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today (London: Verso, 1988), 174. Though Marx
explicitly states in Capital that all production in capitalism is simultaneously reproduction, the
question of how women’s activity in the private sphere figures into this “simple process of
reproduction” is famously left unclear there.
118
Anticipating and providing a crucial precedent for the radical left’s demand for “guaranteed
income” today! Lotta Feminista, “Introduction to the Debate” (1970), in Italian Feminist
88
Thought: A Reader, eds Paolo Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 260-261, 261.
See also Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of
the Community (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1972).
119
This economic problem is one that of course confronts waged domestic workers as well, and
especially “live-in” workers who do their caring labor in the private households of their
employers. See the essays by Folbre, Ironmonger and Bittman in Family Time: The Social
Organization of Care, eds. Nancy Folbre and Michael Bittman (London: Routledge, 2004).
120
Ferguson, "Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work." URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2004/entries/feminism-class/>.
121
To be sure, the distinction between work and play poses a different, and in some ways more
complicated issue in the case of unpaid activity in the private sphere than it does in the realm of
commoditized labor-power, given the absence in the former of a formalized system of abstract
equivalence or exchange. (In contrast, of course, to a sphere of circulation in which buyers and
sellers of labor-power confront one another directly, and in which the worth of labor-power is
determined by an average amount of “socially necessary labor,” measured by specific units of
time). In the private sphere the work/play problem is thus a qualitative and a quantitative
problem, whereas in the world of commoditized labor (where only exchange value matters) it
appears only in the form of a qualitative one. But in spite of this difference, the difficulty of
separating work from play in the case of non-market activity in the household, is one that
conceptually mirrors the historically concomitant convergence of work and play in the postFordist or virtuosic workplace—which as we have seen in the case of the global trends in caring
or affective labor done for wages, now includes the family, as well as the office, showroom, and
factory floor.
122
Meaghan Morris, “in any event,” in Men in Feminism, eds. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith
(New York, Methuen, 1987), 173-181, TK.
123
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1999), xxviii.
124
Mary Ann Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator,” in
Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 33-43,
40. Meaghan Morris, “in any event,” in Men in Feminism, eds. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith
(New York, Methuen, 1987), 173-181.
125
Emotional labor thus requires more emotional labor to disguise its traces, as Hochschild
notes. In fact, “the more [woman’s] labor does not show as labor,” Hochschild writes, “the more
successful it is disguised as the absence of other, more prized qualities,” among which
Hochschild lists the skill of —telling jokes. See The Managed Heart, p. TK.
126
On this see Matthew Rampley, Nietzsche, Aesthetics, and Modernity (Cambridge UP, 2000),
204-215.
89
127
The citations of Irigaray, Cixious, and Butler are Davis’s. See Diana Mowery Davis,
“Breaking up” [At] Phallocracy: Postfeminism’s Chortling Hammer. Rhetoric Review, Vol. 14,
No. 1 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 126-141, 137. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans.
Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985). Helene Cixious, “The
Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875-93. Julia
Kristeva, “Postmodernism?” in Romanticism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, ed. Harry R. Garvin
(Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1980), 136-41. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), TK. See also Kathi Weeks’s arguments on
behalf of an explicitly Nietzschean “ironic self-laughter” for feminism in “Subject for a Feminist
Standpoint,” 102-107.
128
Karen Finley, A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), TK.
129
Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh, “A Fem(me)inist Manifesto,” in Brazen Femme:
Queering Femininity (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 165-170.
130
Bull, p. 125.
131
See Alex Woloch, The One Vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist
in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
132
Luce Irigaray, “Veiled Lips,” trans. Sara Speidel, Mississippi Review 11.3 (1983): 98, 118.
Cited by Doane, “Veiling over Desire” in Femme Fatales, 58.
133
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978).
134
As an afterthought Nietzsche adds that “In superior social conditions, too, in a similar human
type develops under similar pressures; only in such cases the histrionic instinct is usually barely
kept under control by another instinct; for example, in the case of ‘diplomats.’ Incidentally, I am
inclined to believe that a good diplomat would always be free to become a good stage actor if he
wished—if only he were ‘free.’ See The Gay Science, 317.
135
Nietzsche here is referring to Heraclitus, for whom play is the very ontology of being (as
time): “The course of the world is a playing child moving figures on a board.” See Kaufmann,
The Gay Science, fn. 38, p. 248.
90