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What Is Called Thinking with ShaXXXspeares and Walter Benjamin?: Managing De/Kon/struction, Toying with Letters in The Lego Movie Richard Burt Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 16, Number 3, Summer 2016, pp. 94-115 (Article) Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2016.0023 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/644115 Access provided by University of Florida Libraries (30 Sep 2017 17:13 GMT) What Is Called Tinking with ShaXXXspeares and Walter Benjamin? Managing De/Kon/struction, Toying with Letters in Te Lego Movie richard burt abstract Drawing on Paul de Man’s essay on Heinrich von Kleist’s Marionette Teater and on several essays by Walter Benjamin on puppets and toys, this essay explores Shakespeare’s appearance as a Master Builder in the Te Lego Movie, the LEGO Movie Videogame, several amateur YouTube videos of scenes from Shakespeare using Lego toys, a Shakespeare Lego action fgure, and a two volume Brick Shakespeare edition of eight plays using photographs of Lego models as characters. Te fgures of the puppet and the toy open up a perspective on the mimicry of stop- motion animation in Te Lego Movie and what German novelist Friedrich Teodor Vischer calls “Die Tücke des Objekts” (“the spite of objects”). With digital cinema, animation has re- gained the centrality it had before the advent of narrative cinema, the diference being that digital animation uses CGI whereas stop- motion animation requires the flmmaker to act as of- screen puppeteer. As a minor Master Builder engaged in awesome destruction, Te Lego Movie’s Shakespeare ofers a small- scale way of thinking the flm’s clever fetishization of what it calls the “piece of resistance.” Freud does not explicitly examine the status of the “materialized” supple- ment which is necessary to the alleged spontaneity of memory, even if that spontaneity were diferentiated in itself, thwarted by a censorship or re- pression which, moreover, could not act on a perfectly spontaneous mem- ory. Far from the machine being a pure absence of spontaneity, its resemblance to the psychical apparatus, its existence and its necessity bear the journal for early modern cultural studies vol. 16, no. 3 (summer 2016) © 2016 24096_JEMCS_16.3_TX.indd 94 11/4/16 11:12 AM BurttTinking with ShaXXXspeares 95 witness to the fnitude of the mnemic spontaneity which is thus supple- mented. Te machine and, consequently, representation is death and fni- tude within the psyche. Nor does Freud examine the possibility of this machine, which, in the world, has at least begun to resemble memory, and increasingly resembles it more closely. Its resemblance to memory is closer than that of the innocent Mystic Pad: the latter is no doubt infnitely more complex than slate or paper, less archaic than a palimpsest; but, compared to other machines for storing archives, it is a child’s toy. — Jacques Derrida, Writing and Diference Yet the more consequentially it distances itself, through perfection, from making, the more fragile its own made existence necessarily becomes: the endless pains to eradicate the traces of making, injure works of art and condemn them to be fragmentary. Art, following the decay [Zerfall: disin- tegration] of magic, has taken upon itself the transmission of images to posterity. But in this task it employs the same principle that destroyed im- ages: the stem of its Greek name is the same as that of technique. Its para- doxical entanglement in the process of civilization brings it into confict with its own idea. Te archetypes of our time, synthetically concocted by flm and hit- song for the bleak contemplation of the late industrial era, do not merely liquidate art, but, by their blatant feeble- mindedness, blast into daylight the delusion that was always immured in the oldest works of art and which still gives the maturest their power. — Teodor Adorno, Minima Moralia In the twenties he was apt to ofer philosophical refections as he brought forth a toy for his son. — Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Te Story of a Friendship Think Tanking o, no, no, this is a disaster!” So says the Man Upstairs (Will Ferrell) “Nin a live action sequence near the end of the mostly 3D CGI animated flm Te Lego Movie (2014), as the Man begins to chastise his son Finn (Jadon Sand) for playing with the Man’s carefully assembled LEGO- (Out)LANDish scale model of a downtown area (fg. 1). “You know the rules. Tis isn’t a toy,” the Man adds. In his defense, Finn insists that “it kinda is.” Te Man insists, however, that it isn’t: “No. It is a highly sophisticated interlocking brick sys- 24096_JEMCS_16.3_TX.indd 95 11/4/16 11:12 AM 96 5IF+PVSOBMGPS&BSMZ.PEFSO$VMUVSBM4UVEJFT t űŶų Fig. 1: Te Man Upstairs. Te Lego Movie. Dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. 2014. © Warner Brothers Fig. 2: Piece of resistance. Te Lego Movie. Dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. 2014. © Warner Brothers tem.” Finn avers, “We bought it at a toy store.” “We did,” the father admits, but adds, “Te way I’m using it makes it an adult thing.” Declining the Man’s ofer to play with his own Legos in a cardboard box, Finn pleads, “You can’t expect me to resist playing with this.” I have cited the dialogue extensively in order to show how this scene brings to the surface questions about what counts as a disaster, what counts as play, what counts as a toy, what counts as adult, what counts as human, and what counts as building. What is the Man doing if not playing? Te Man is a suit, but the flm does not give him a job or a proper name. Whether Te Lego Movie poses these questions in recognizably philosophical ways, in this or scene or in its overarching narrative, is not exactly clear. Having fallen through a magic portal into Finn’s basement, the main character, a construction worker named Emmet Brickowski, fnds the missing “piece of resistance” (fg. 2), a cap from a bottle of the “Kragle,” a tube of Krazy Glue (fgs. 3 and 4) which is misread by the Lego characters because the letters z, y, and u have been inadvertently re- moved due to use.1 Emmet intends to put the piece of resistance back on the 24096_JEMCS_16.3_TX.indd 96 11/4/16 11:13 AM BurttTinking with ShaXXXspeares 97 Fig. 3: Kragle. Te Lego Movie. Dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. 2014. © Warner Brothers Fig. 4: Krazy Glue. Te Lego Movie. Dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. 2014. © Warner Brothers bottle and thereby prevent Lord Business, aka President Business, a double of the Man Upstairs and voiced by Will Ferrell, from using it as his secret weapon to freeze all the Lego people into place permanently. Emmet returns to the Lego world after Finn sends him back through the magic portal, and makes peace with Lord Business, who puts the cap back on the Kragle, which then explodes, apparently killing him while releasing Emmet to reunite and hook up with Wyldstyle, only to be met by a new invasion of Legos from the Planet Duplon created by Finn’s sister who have “come to destroy” him. The Ideology of the Aesthetic as a Category I will have more to say about the flm’s narrative structure and I will be getting to Shakespeare’s place in the flm shortly, but in order to engage the questions of the aesthetic category of cuteness and the afect of things that are the twin foci of this special issue on “Cute Shakespeare,” I will ofer a De/Kon/struc- 24096_JEMCS_16.3_TX.indd 97 11/4/16 11:13 AM 98 5IF+PVSOBMGPS&BSMZ.PEFSO$VMUVSBM4UVEJFT t űŶų tion2 of the flm’s lack of instruction, its non- educational value, its resistance to being read, or unreadability.3 In my view, the crucial question is not which aes- thetic categories are most suitable to understand our postmodern condition but whether the aesthetic is a category at all.4 To address this question all too briefy, I turn to Paul de Man’s critique of what he calls “aesthetic ideology” as articulated by Friedrich Schiller in On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Se- ries of Letters: “Te aesthetic, as is clear from Schiller’s formulation, is primar- ily a social and political model ethically grounded in an assumedly Kantian notion of freedom” (De Man, Aesthetic Ideology 264). De Man goes on to say that the aesthetic is not a category but an articulation or, one might say, man- agement of cognition: [T]he aesthetic is not a separate category but a principle of articulation be- tween various known faculties, activities, and modes of cognition. What gives the aesthetic its power and hence its practical, political impact, is its intimate link with knowledge, the epistemological implications that are always in play when the aesthetic appears over the horizon. (De Man, Aes- thetic Ideology 265) In his closely related essay “Kant and Schiller,” de Man expands his critique of Schiller’s aesthetic ideology to include a critique of popularization, of what gets read and by whom: A kind of knowledge which is less rigorous, less scientifc, and which is more popular. So in that way, education leads to a concept of art as the popularization of philosophy. Philosophy isn’t taught, because it is a popu- larization, a metaphorization of philosophy. As such, the aesthetic belongs to the masses. It belongs . to culture, and as such it belongs to the state, to the aesthetic state, and it justifes the state.

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