The subjects of this book, like its subject matter, should be taken in earnest.
In Thomas Bernhard’s “In Earnest,” one of 104 short stories from a collection entitled The Voice Imitator, the narrator describes an episode in which a group of Bavarian excursionists encounter at the precipice of a “rocky ledge above the so-called Salzburg horse-pond” a well-known and successful “comic actor who had for decades earned his living by being funny.” Suited in “lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat on his head,” the actor states his intention of throwing himself off the ledge. Taking the declaration as a joke, the group “as usual burst into laughter.” Fulfilling their “long-expected sensation,” however, “the actor is reported to have said that he was in earnest and to have immediately thrown himself off.”1
Like all of the stories in the collection, the narrator adopts a voice at once familiar and strange, a tone banal and horrific, and a humor as dry as the growing desert. Deviations are remarked, catastrophes described with minimal embellishment and without sensation: no shock, no awe. Idiotic and senseless events unfold in variation, subjects run amok, and common phrases such as “in the nature of things” and adjectives like “so-called” are repeated to the point of assuming a vacuous significance. The narrator registers details with dandyesque lucidity, as an I coolly detached, Luciferian, even in hatred2 like an atomist acknowledging the eternal and meaningless rain of atoms within the void. The universe Bernhard constructs is one where things go horribly wrong, accidents happen, crimes are committed, and cruelties perpetrated not as exceptions but as matters of course. Liquidation world: everything must go.
Earnestness—the most priggish of virtues—becomes ridiculous precisely for being uttered without a hint of irony, dryly executed, murdered into insignificance by being quite simply the case. The opposite of Oscar Wilde’s prose, whose The Importance of Being Earnest abounds in clever plays and ironic twists, the dark humor of Bernhard’s stories derives from the manner in which the language is forced into literality, removed from the ease and facility of its sense, of its inattentive deployments, of its capacity to say the opposite. The humor derives from this excessive precision, where the word says itself into oblivion as a drill bit’s pitiless repetition bores a hole. Bernhard works toward isolating the non-sense of sense by attending literally to the sense in an effort to reach “the greatest exactitude and the most extreme dissolution.”3 The narrative tone itself assumes a character similar to Gilles Deleuze’s treatment of Bartleby the Scrivener’s formula I would prefer not to: a statement that “means only what it says, literally,” becoming an agrammatical formula through its repeated utterance that focuses the sense of the statement on its anomalous ring as if it were an “inarticulate block, a single breath.”4 Unsurprisingly, each story in Bernhard’s book is presented as a single block on a single page. The book of stories is a stack of paragraphs accumulating horizontally in space like Carl Andre’s Lever (1966).
The story following “In Earnest” in the collection, “Too Much,” comprised of a single sentence, is exemplary in this regard for its economy and precision, and its sinisterly sick humor: “A Paterfamilias who had for decades been praised and beloved for a so-called extraordinary sense of family and who one Saturday afternoon, admittedly in especially humid weather, murdered four of his six children, defended himself in court by saying that all of a sudden the children were too much for him.”5 The children were indeed too much for him: an explanation that explains everything by explaining nothing. The understatement of the overstatement pushes the expression in violently opposing directions as if to force the expression to literally understate itself, voiding itself of sense. In such a world where the most horrible has become horribly funny, in such a liquidation world, for things to be taken in earnest requires the earnestness of such quintessentially comic acts. It requires subjects to step off the ledge. Not to say that either suicide or murdering one’s children is funny, but that the language that frames these events makes them funny when language itself is removed from its vague capacity for euphemism, when it tries to simply mark the hole in space. The single sentence of a single paragraph of a singular story on a singular page: language, like a thing, is a hole in a thing it is not.
Horror occasions a stripping bare of sense where language’s push toward the literal succeeds by failing, when the word becomes a mute obstacle, a stumbling block. Language that makes one trip occasions a thinking that can pronounce on the nothing it marks. The comic actor’s comic act is a matter of saying what he does, of being earnest. If its fulfillment renders earnestness ridiculously funny, it is because his act, throwing himself off, puts the value of earnestness as such into question.
This is what earnestness should do: it should throw one off. Such earnestness in a comic actor is what is called deadpan. The comic act is a matter of making oneself absent, effecting a separation between an effect caused and the one who caused it. The comic subject is situated in this gap where one (he or she) becomes an object of laughter while refusing to recognize its cause. If Bernhard’s comic actor makes comedy by doing what he says, he also makes the sensation expected of him my marking it: it is in earnest, he says. Such comedy is the opposite of lighthearted; it is a heaviness that plummets like the subject that steps off the ledge. Stepping off is a nihilistic act, and not simply because the subject decides that she or he (it) has had it. The nihilism of the act consists in consigning the subject to the weight of the person, that being irreversibly inscribed into that most pivotal law of classical mechanics: the law of gravity. The comic actor, however, does not simply take the plunge but does so in earnest, fulfilling language’s promise: it meant what he said. Language in the comic act says what it does; it removes the subject from its place, leaving that absence into which a whole host of things can be tossed, including one’s own person. And the comedy of the act lies in the decision stated in earnest to make the person go along for the ride. It is not the suicide itself that is comic, but its staging, the way in which it draws focus to the hole where the subject goes absentee, and it is this humor—the undeniable truth of its funniness—that marks the hole of sense. The comic actor makes an object of his absence: while his person falls, this object remains.
To make an object of absence: this is the central problem that runs throughout this book and which I often refer to as the absentee or dissolute subject. All of the subjects treated in this book internalize a relation to their own absence by making an object of it. This book at its core is a study of a series of such “object-subjects” and the artistic practices involved in their elaboration and production. Subjects that relate to themselves as objects, they become impersonators of their own absence. Pervaded by a dark humor, these subjects step off the ledge to mark the place of their absence, that is, the void beneath their feet.
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Bernhard points to the vertigo of impersonation in the story “The Voice Imitator,” which is also the title for the collection of stories as a whole. The narrator recounts an occasion in which a “voice imitator” is invited to Kahlenberg to show off his art, which he does quite brilliantly, faltering only when presented with the request to imitate his own voice: “When, however, at the very end, we suggested that he imitate his own voice, he said he could not do that.”6
This story should be read at two levels. At the first level, it is an allegory of the impossibility of separating the artist from the singularity of his or her own voice, which, as the medium of imitation cannot itself be imitated by the artist him or herself. The voice of an artist is inimitable precisely because it is produced through a relation to an other voice that is not the author’s own. The story itself becomes an allegory of the art of writing as voice imitation as such whose singularity—an author’s voice—cannot itself be separated from its act of inhabiting a voice. In addition to this allegorical reading, which of course indexes the problem of voice as it functions across the stories in the collection, it also refers to a specific figure, a voice imitator, or more familiarly, an impersonator. The story recounts the impossibility of a specific subject, namely that of the voice imitator, imitating its own voice. The “own” here remains ambiguous: it could refer to the person of the voice imitator, i.e., the person the subject is when not engaging in his practice. However, the “own” could also refer to the voice imitator as such, since this character has no other identity within the story. In this case, the voice the “voice imitator” cannot imitate is the act of imitating itself, because it lacks a voice of its own. Translated into the terms of impersonation: the impersonator cannot impersonate the manner in which he or she impersonates. And the problem of authorial voice as it is posed in this collection engages the interminable equivocation in the sense of the voice imitator’s “ownness.” To stress the impossibility of imitating one’s own voice—the strange and enigmatic fact that one can become a caricature of oneself, but cannot oneself be the one to produce that caricature—cannot be separated from the impossibility of impersonating the act of impersonation. Insofar as we are persons, we are impersonators who neglect to take the “im” of our personations into account. The inimitability of the “own” consists in the “im” and not a presumed personal identity.
So the story and the collection as a whole pose the enigma of the anomalous voice of the one who impersonates. Wherein and in what does the persona of the impersonator (the figure who singularly lacks a persona) consist? This incapacity on the part of the voice imitator to imitate his own voice signals the strange truth that voice imitation, and impersonation as such, lie between the third person and the first person. The omnipresent I of Bernhard’s novels is constantly marking this displacement in which a one (the third person) is subjectivated: spoken as “I,” in the first person. Impersonation consists in the very act of separating the I from its first personness by assuming the I (strictly speaking, the me) of an other, which is then spoken in the first person. Since the impersonation is not riveted to any particular other or person, it is the other as such (the Other) that is always implicated in an impersonation: the one who speaks in me. Oddly, an impersonation implies that the I of the impersonator is situated between its person and the impersonal I. This gap enables the impersonator to personify the other, and it is this gap that produces something like the inimitability of one’s own voice. In this case, the “clever” request for the “voice imitator” to imitate his own voice makes no sense, since he cannot imitate his own voice, qua voice imitator, without the other; and since one’s “own voice” qua impersonator lies in the “im” of personation, it can only appear through the adoption of an other’s inflection: the marking of the singularity and difference between the other and the Other (others that speak and the one who speaks them). There is no voice that would be his own, but it is also nobody else’s voice. It is this strange anonymous voice, which is nonetheless singular and inimitable, that the writer (and let’s here assert, the artist as such) seeks. The artist-writer as an impersonator, as a voice imitator, is a subject that has no person. The impersonator is situated in the gap between the person (the persona of the other) and their own im(non)personality.
A decisive consequence must be drawn. Impersonation does not confirm but abolishes reflexivity: the circuit that at least syntactically allows one to say both I and me. In positioning oneself as the other, one establishes not one’s own identity but paradoxically one’s nonidentity in the adoption of a persona. An impersonation (personification of the other) implies an im-personation (of the self). One becomes a person only by separating oneself from one’s own subjectivity, situating the gap between it and the person. What one accepts as reflexivity is in fact an impersonation of the gap between that which differentiates the persona and the subject.
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A “comedian” like Andy Kaufman consists as a subject through the manner in which he plays with the relation between personhood (personal identity) and the impersonal. His act lies in identifying his own person with an impersonation. His performances—as strange as they are funny—present the subject as absent: a placeholder of a vacancy attached to an unconvincing person. We neither believe nor disbelieve in the identity of the figures he presents (Foreign Man or Tony Clifton or the many variations of himself, Andy). They are beyond belief, not in the sense of being unbelievable but in that, as is perhaps most clear in Kaufman’s “self”-appearance, the persons do not appear to be present, even when appearing in person, so to speak. It is as if the person he is has become completely identified with the “im” of personation. As if, impersonating his own absence, the singularity of his person attaches itself to the absence it marks.
Despite his claims to the contrary, Andy Kaufman is indeed a comedian. Yet the necessity of adding this “indeed” belies an uncertainty that infects the judgment, tipping it toward the interrogative: is he indeed a comedian? The strangeness of Kaufman’s humor—his not-funny funniness—lies in his uncanny ability to wrong-step the audience, thwarting any attempt to categorize his performance. As Julie Hecht reports: “‘I just want the audience to have a wonderful, happy feeling inside them and leave with big smiles on their faces,’ Andy told me with a blank stare the first time I met him. ‘I can’t help if people laugh, I’m not trying to be funny,’ he explained. He said that he felt insulted when he saw reviews calling him a comedian.”7 Yet his desire not to be taken seriously as a comedian—“I’m just a simple entertainer … I just want to put smiles on people’s faces”—is undermined by his comic ambition—“I wouldn’t mind being compared to Charlie Chaplin or W. C. Fields.” To take comedy seriously, that is to say, in earnest, one has to not be a comedian. And his relation to Marcel Duchamp, in this regard, has not gone unremarked.8 Put differently, to take comedy seriously, one cannot be serious about being a comedian. This is Andy Kaufman’s strange ambition, to take comedy seriously, that is, in earnest. He, too, steps off the ledge, or, as he prefers, goes too far.9
If comedy is fundamentally a wound to seriousness, then how can the comedian take what he or she is doing seriously? The false solution to this dilemma would be to simply ham it up, to play the fool, to not commit oneself to what one does: I am a comedian; therefore I am not to be taken seriously. Kaufman’s solution is curious: I am not a comedian; therefore I am to be taken seriously (as a comedian). Kaufman assumes an identity that can only be affirmed through its disavowal. And it is this paradox that he unfolds with unsurpassable rigor. What he articulates, if one follows the logic of his performance, is that comedy consists in miscognition. The act of comedy undermines being a comedian, since comedy itself consists in the frustration of the logic of identification. To make comedy requires standing in the place of one’s own absence. To be painfully consistent, the comedian has to be a noncomedian, since comedy consists in the separation of the subject from its role, from its persona. The purest form of comedy, Kaufman proposes, is in fact impersonation. The impersonator is not one with its appearance. Yet, rather than comfortably assuming the role of the entertainer as one who is not one with how they appear—which assumes that there is an identity behind the appearance, a real me behind the role—Kaufman states: I am not one with how I appear because one is not one. Conversely, he says, this is me, I am me, there is no other I than this me here.
His act turns on an incessant play with and on negation, in which he thwarts any attempt to either identify him with his role or distance him from it. If he is not a comedian, it is because he is a comic impersonator: an impersonator of the comedian. Kaufman’s genius lies in the manifold ways in which he plays with the logic of impersonation. Neither the ventriloquist nor the impersonator is an actor in the classical sense.10 Whereas an actor is defined by the assumption of a character whose success consists in maintaining the difference between the actor and his or her mask (persona), the impersonator, as the word itself suggests, is less a matter of assuming or forging a character than of distancing oneself from one’s own character. The assumption of a persona implies the deformation, if not destruction, of one’s own. To im-personate suggests a separation from one’s own person, and it is this separation that Kaufman exhibits in exemplary manner. One of his first “characters,” significantly enough, is an impersonator himself whose identity is that of a nondescript “foreign man.” Foreign Man’s act consists chiefly of jokes without punch lines and impersonations almost all of which are abominable until he proposes to do “the Elvis Presley,” whom he then impersonates with an uncanny genius. Foreign Man is a figure that makes people laugh when he does not intend to and produces awkward silence when he intends to make people laugh. He is a subject who does not know the rules of the game and is constantly failing (e.g., his appearance as “Baji Kimran” in 1978 on The Dating Game, where his “failing” is precisely being earnest). He is always an object of laughter and never a subject. Kaufman, to force language a bit, impersonifies the person. Erecting a comic identity on the ruins of the person, Kaufman relentlessly exposes the “im” of personation.
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The comic actor, the impersonator, and Andy Kaufman—these exemplary instances of dissolute subjectivity—all take their absence earnestly. They no longer believe in the integrity of the person. In this sense, they provide a means of introduction to the concerns of this book. They are exemplars that portend a series of exemplary instances to come and whose theoretical portraits I wish to sketch. If I stress the notion of portraiture, it is because in each chapter a kind of subject is at stake—an absentee subject—that finds its locus or loci in the objects that absent it. Each chapter is a sketch of a subject and an attempt to think the manner in which it absents itself.
The book traverses a series of artistic and literary figures and a range of types. It begins with a sustained consideration of Marcel Duchamp’s apparatus of the Stoppages as a means to orient thought within the medium of its own disorientation (chapter 1), then proceeds to touch on the strange comedy of Marcel Broodthaers’s sustained meditation on the conundrum of being an art object (chapter 2). The theme of the comic introduced with Broodthaers then opens onto two chapters that develop the notion of the comic subject: the umouristic subject treats the inimitable Jacques Vaché (chapter 3), while the ridiculous subject takes its departure from Alfred Jarry’s pistol (chapter 4). The nihilist as a figure that counts for nothing passes by way of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste (chapter 5) to an interpretation of the dandy inspired by Oswald Wiener’s singular engagement with this figure (chapter 6). The final chapter approaches Baudelaire as the happy melancholic (chapter 7).
Although the practices differ, I have chosen them because each assumes from the outset a subject that is sick, to use Freud’s terminology. These subjects are sick in the specific sense that they assume the absence of meaning and the liquidation of value. In a letter to his good friend Marie Bonaparte, on August 13, 1937, Freud writes:
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression. I am afraid these explanations of mine are not very wonderful. Perhaps because I am too pessimistic. I have an advertisement floating about in my head which I consider the boldest and most successful piece of American publicity: “Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?”11
The subjects taken up in the following chapters all accept as an axiom of thought the not very wonderful. They are all haunted, like Freud, by this audacious query fit for advertising the bleak terrain of the spaghetti Western: Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?
This book should be of concern, I hope, to all of us who take this ill-defined activity, the practice we call thought, seriously, that is in earnest. Knowing full well its fragility and the ease with which it is snuffed out, these figures each consign subjectivity to thought as a means of sustaining or propping up their own absence in a world where “life is not a sacred thing, to be protected by force of arms if necessary, but an intrinsically worthless commodity.”12 They concern themselves with art, with thought, without assuming its value or meaning from the outset. They begin from a point of utter debasement, from what Marx terms, in a moment of impolite lucidity, the “universal prostitution … of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities.”13 Only a subject fundamentally disoriented, thrown off axis, unanchored, only a subject that assumes the world as liquidated of all meaning, of all value, would indeed assume the peculiar task of making an object of their absence.
Emblems of absence, these subjects sustain thought in deeply grim times. This book, if nothing else, is a document of a commitment, to borrow a wonderful phrase from Harold Pinter, to accept nothing from the bargain basement. Thinking is a matter of “leaving no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.”14 A thinking that takes the void as its medium is buoyant. Democritus after all is the laughing philosopher. Far from being crushed by the void’s depressive weight, the subject that makes an object of its absence grasps the earnestness of the comic.