Awkwardness or, The Cultural Logic of Larry David
University of Amsterdam Research Master Media Studies
Graduate School of Humanities
Peter Gigg Student Number: 10396462 [email protected]
Supervisor: dr. A.M. Geil
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 2
Abstract
Awkwardness is something we are all familiar with. We recognise it when we experience it and identify it in other people or situations, but the question of what awkwardness is remains crucially unanswered. This thesis will take the contemporary prevalence of ‘Awkward Comedy’ in popular culture as impetus for a theoretical and philosophical study of awkwardness’ structures and effects.
With HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm as its chief case study, this project asks what awkwardness tells us about the contemporary world. It shows that feelings such as awkwardness are not ‘natural’ occurrences – rather, they are informed by particular social and political movements, reflecting the logics and assumptions of their moment in history.
Awkwardness as read through Curb both evidences its socio-political context and offers a means of critique, interrogating the standards of normativity through which it comports itself. It demonstrates the determinism inherent to our ‘free’ society, and affords a means of emancipation, through the active pursuit and embrace of our awkwardness.
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 3
Contents
Introduction ...... 4
Chapter 1 – Existential Awkwardness ...... 13
Chapter 2 - Awkward Comedy ...... 29
Chapter 3 – An Awkward Politics ...... 45
Some Awkward Conclusions ...... 59
Bibliography ...... 64
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 4
Introduction – “it was kind of an awkward moment…” Awkwardness seems to both precede Larry David and follow in his wake. As the creator, lead writer, and star of the quasi-biographical HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, David has a knack for identifying and constructing locus-points of the awkward – uncomfortable or ‘difficult’ social situations which he is forced to navigate with vary degrees of non-success. This awkwardness is a slippery concept, somehow both a feeling unto itself, a modifier of other feelings, and a reaction to a broader, societal, ‘feeling.’ And yet, despite this elusivity, Larry discloses its critical potentials quite succinctly; when a stranger accuses him of being a “self-loathing Jew” for whistling a Wagner melody, he deadpans, “I may hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish.” Indeed, his self-loathing has everything to do with everything else.
Aside from its talented ensemble cast and brilliant improvisatory dialogue, the show’s enduring success resides in this deceptively sophisticated oscillation between self-hatred and societal-hatred, a railing against one’s own inadequacies and the failings of our contemporary milieu. In this tension, Curb discloses the means by which the human subject is produced, through the essential incompatibility of the individual and the collective. To be awkward is to experience oneself as lacking, but also to experience the society which produces the self as inherently lacking.
In this light, my thesis shall consider the essential structures and generative potentials of awkwardness, as read through Curb Your Enthusiasm. Awkwardness can only exist relative to its context, the guiding terms of ‘normality’ which stipulate the standard from which awkwardness deviates. Could the essential awkwardness of Curb then advance a vital critique of the conditions of western society? In its very existence, awkwardness problematises the logic of everyday conduct, demonstrating the ‘failings’ of conventional ideology. But in doing so, awkwardness problematises its own logic, discrediting the existential basis of normativity through which it comports itself.
Establishing a workable definition of awkwardness evidences some of these Peter Gigg Awkwardness 5 cyclical processes. It is clearly a defining ‘mood’ of this contemporary moment – the prevailing notion that things don’t quite make sense, that one is constantly struggling to keep up with an ever-advancing schema of societal codes and ‘norms’ – but it is hard to specify exactly what awkwardness is. Colloquial attempts at definition often approach basic tautology: awkwardness is simply that which is awkward. Official definitions hardly fare any better. Merriam- Webster variously stipulates the awkward as:
- lacking dexterity or skill - lacking ease or grace - lacking social grace and assurance - not easy to handle or deal with
Is awkwardness then to be understood purely as a negative concept, a fundamental lack in the subject’s social ‘being,’ or something that they are not doing? This seems somewhat discordant with the endemic scale of modern awkwardness; if awkwardness is so widely felt, then doesn’t this fundamentally challenge the ‘standard-ness’ of the standard from which it deviates? Likewise, these various definitions are only relevant when read in relation to a single subject; if an entire generation is principally “lacking social grace and assurance,” then this calls into question our normative criteria of social grace and assurance. This last notion of “not easy to handle or deal with” ironically also speaks of any attempt to grasp the concept in its entirety – a further tautology. Rather appropriately, it would appear that awkwardness can be quite awkward.
As if to support this, Merriam-Webster offers something of an awkward sub- definition – “showing the result of a lack of expertness.” What is this expertness to which the awkward pertains? In staging the hypothetical questions awkwardness necessitates, we are beginning to consider awkwardness as reflecting and commenting on its particular societal context. However, in turn, this reduces awkwardness to a mere “result” of some other condition. I think it is more productive to think of it as both result of a pre-existing circumstance, and a specific circumstance in its own right. Or rather, awkwardness on a societal level Peter Gigg Awkwardness 6 produces awkwardness on a social level, which then cyclically informs the principles of a society. Similarly, we can think of awkwardness as a feeling or mood in its own right (“Well, that was awkward…”), and as a modifier of other feelings - one can experience awkward joy, awkward tears, and indeed awkward laughter. Perhaps then, it is better to think of it as something of a ‘meta-mood’, somehow both general and particular at the same time, and in the same movement.
A cursory look at the etymology of awkward is useful. In his pop-philosophy essay Awkwardness, Adam Kotsko proffers the following:
The -ward of awkward is the selfsame -ward as in forward or backward. As for the first syllable, it comes from the Middle English awke, which designated something turned in the wrong direction. (13)
Here we have an integral element of movement, which will recur frequently in the theory I later address. More pertinent at this stage is the directional quotient, implying a subject (whether consciously or not) specifically turning away from normative ‘being’. I think it is crucial to state that this ‘wrong’ direction is not a binary opposite of the ‘rightward’ movement, but can be a myriad of counter- normative positions and directions, such that the mere existence of awkwardness repudiates our basic societal conceptions of right and wrong. To be awkward is a movement perennially out of step with received practices, but one which requires at least a basic knowledge of societal customs so as to keep it from the realm of blissful ignorance. To be awkward is to understand one’s own deviance, but to be somehow unable (or unwilling) to assume the ‘correct’ stance.
Quite tellingly, little social theory addresses the phenomenon of awkwardness. This is maybe a product of its very contemporaneity, with theorists having not yet 'caught up' with a condition still in development. Alternately, this speaks of a sociopolitical environment in which awkwardness has become effectively naturalised, assumed as something which simply 'is', a necessary condition of Peter Gigg Awkwardness 7 our being, rather than an emergent category of experience in its own right. If we understand awkwardness in terms of its essential deviation from the standards a society ordains, it can be wielded as a flexible means of societal critique, pointing to the means by which ‘standards’ are produced and standard-ised. Similarly, the self-consciousness engendered in the awkward moment affords a remarkably capable means to examine our own subject position from an ‘exterior perspective,’ since “awkward moments have a way of pitting ourselves against our own history” (Batuman). Awkwardness then allows the subject to assume a critical distance from their self and selfhood. In unpicking awkwardness, and establishing its essential structure, we can critique internal and external processes of governmentality and self-regulation as integral to our normative, hegemonic, society.
Furthermore, the difficulty in establishing a fixed definition or model for awkwardness should not necessarily be considered a hindrance. Feelings that are in flux, or a state of development, can inform a more nuanced understanding of societal determinism than a dependence on established models of behavior. In the chapter “Structures of Feeling,” in his Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams argues that “it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error” (129, emphasis mine). The social is always experienced in the present tense, so any corresponding social theory must adopt a malleable stance, and resist falling back upon the established (and thus outdated) structures of the past. As Williams clarifies, “we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present […] a particular quality of social experience and relationships, historically distinct from other particular qualities which gives the sense of a generation or of a period” (128-31, emphasis mine). Awkwardness, with its multivalence of causes and effects would certainly appear to reflect and characterise the experience of the present1. Moreover, these structures “do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalisation before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action” (132) – we can consider these processes’ lived effects before we concretely determine exactly what the processes are.
1 At least for the white, western middle-classes, within which I must necessarily situate myself. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 8
Supporting my methodological approach, William’s argument suggests “a way of defining forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a sociomaterial process” and that “forms and conventions in art and literature are often among the first indications that such a new structure is forming” (133). My thesis shall hence consider awkwardness as a principally contemporary ‘feeling,’ as evidenced by the recent prevalence of awkwardness in popular entertainment, specifically in American and British situation comedy. The proliferation of ‘awkward comedy’ (sometimes termed ‘cringe comedy’) throughout the early 2000s to the present demonstrates the emergence and establishment of new “forms and conventions” in our pop-culture landscape. We can then conceive of the postmodern taste for the awkward as evidencing these inalienable elements of the contemporary social-political situation, elements which will reveal themselves and develop through further analysis.
This brings me back to my principal case study, the long running (2000 – present) sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Dubbed “the apotheosis of awkward” (Kotsko), Curb functions as something of a ‘meta-sequel’ to David’s seminal Seinfeld. It adopts a curious cinéma vérité stance, depicting the quandaries and foibles of Larry’s day-to-day existence in the wake of his past success. This “Larry David” is clearly something of a comic construct, but inhabits various aspects of David’s ‘real’ life; he too is the creator of Seinfeld, lives an apparently luxurious life in the Los Angeles suburbs, and mingles with the appropriate ‘showbiz’ cohorts2. Despite his material achievement, Curb reliably demonstrates Larry’s social failings, his persistent inability to assume the 'correct' mode of conduct amid his various neuroses. Narratives are purposefully mundane and inconclusive - a typical episode might focus on a fellow customer at a bowling alley accidentally stealing Larry's shoes, or around an ongoing debate as to the appropriate "cut-off time" for telephoning a neighbour in the evening. Episodes are usually cyclical in structure, with Larry irresistibly drawn to some apparently trivial annoyance, which produces increasingly disastrous effects.
2 For the purposes of clarity, I will herein refer to Larry David the creator/write/performer as “David,” and Larry David the character within Curb as “Larry”.
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 9
Inevitably, despite his best efforts and occasional best intentions, Larry's actions make the situation exponentially worse, locking him into a vicious cycle wherein awkwardness produces and informs further awkwardness.
Take the following example: Larry is waiting to meet his new orthopedist girlfriend in a hospital canteen. While using the bathroom, he overhears a fellow patron on his phone, berating the "300 pound nigger" who dropped a piece of furniture on his arm. Larry is understandably shocked and, upon eventually meeting his girlfriend, recounts the story to her. Just as he reaches the offending term, his anecdote is overheard by a black doctor – who doesn’t realise that Larry is repeating the word so as to comment on its abhorrence. The moment is obviously extremely awkward, even more so since Larry cannot voice his protestations over the doctor's anti-racist tirade ("You just used the most vile word in the English language […] you are despicable!”). Unbeknownst to Larry, the same doctor is operating on Jeff, Larry's close friend and agent, and, confounded by his rage, mistakenly shaves Jeff's prized head of hair. In later re- re-telling the episode to Jeff's short-tempered wife, Suzie, Larry again repeats the slur, only to be overheard again by Loretta, his (black) lodger. The scene descends into an even greater furore ("Is that what you think of us? That we all a bunch of niggers up in here?"), with Larry's protestations of innocence falling on similarly deaf ears. Such is the nature of the show that this process repeats itself several more times, generating further unintentional offence, and corresponding awkwardness (as Larry is prevented from explaining himself), at each stage.
While nominally a comedy, instances such as this problematise our basic conception of the comic. Curb's particular brand of 'awkward' humour is of specific interest, since it so often tends away from producing outright laughter. Instead, it produces sites of painful recognition and squirming discomfort, such that we are laughing just as much at the conceitedness of our own subject positions than at the actions of the characters onscreen. Curb is both symptomatic and emblematic of a contemporary taste for 'awkward comedy,' first coined via Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's The Office and now Peter Gigg Awkwardness 10 prevalent in everything from Parks and Recreation to True Detective3 (Mills 63- 64, Middleton 2). The pairing of awkwardness and comedy seems appropriately awkward, thanks to the two fields’ perceived incompatibility. Comic levity is something we, as western subjects, typically enjoy and actively pursue, something through which we construct social bonds and establish our sense of self in relation to. Awkwardness outwardly resembles humour's inverse, a sensation we wish to avoid, something we are societally conditioned to expel and push away. To revel in awkwardness in one's daily life would render one a sociopath. What then, explains this counterintuitive paring? More pertinently, what explains the active and concentrated pursuit of awkwardness one instigates when engaging with awkward comedy? In order to satisfactorily answer these questions, and develop further lines of inquiry, we need a methodological approach which does not reduce its object to a mere ‘result’ of its context of origin, but which reads it as both cause and effect. Or rather, Curb produces awkwardness, but it is also produced in awkwardness – categories which necessarily feed back into each other.
Adopting a stance of ‘philosophy through film’ (or the more cumbersome yet more precise 'philosophy and social theory as read through popular television’), this thesis will theorise the Western phenomenon of awkwardness, as evidenced through a comprehensive reading of Curb Your Enthusiasm. That is to say, we can observe the ‘performance’ of modes of socio-political inquiry through this specific medium, and consider it as actualising certain branches of philosophical thought. In turn, I ask what awkwardness discloses about the logics and assumptions of our contemporary society, and how, in doing so, it might point to other, more emancipatory, perspectives and modes of conduct.
My first chapter examines the existential structures of awkwardness, theorising the processes of awkwardness in relation to Martin Heidegger’s analytic of “anxiety”. Awkwardness resembles anxiety in terms of effect, eliciting a comparable dissatisfaction with the terms of normative society. Likewise the two
3 An altogether more somber affair, but there is something undeniably comedic in the awkwardness of the two leads’ interactions. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 11
‘moods’ (Heidegger’s term for the manifestation of ‘how one is’ (Gorner 119)) are self-perpetuating – anxiety and awkwardness necessitate the construction and perpetuation of societal ‘norms,’ our unwritten ‘rules’ which stipulate the bounds of acceptable behavior. But in turn, these norms produce further negative emotions through their conflation and contradiction, a vicious cycle of anxiety. Despite their evident correlation, I believe it is a categorical mistake to just read awkwardness as anxiety per se. Indeed, I envisage awkwardness as a specific response to a condition of societally produced anxiety, which necessarily adopts its structures but produces different effects, and tends away from Heidegger’s somewhat constrictive category of ‘authenticity’.
This leads me to consider in my next chapter the relationship between awkwardness and comedy, which Curb so evidently depends upon. As I have already mentioned, there is something of an assumed tension between these two concepts, awkwardness’ innate ‘ugliness’ contrasting with the obvious attraction of humour. As I shall argue, this apparent disjuncture depends upon a rather too basic conception of comedy as mere perception of incongruity. ‘True’ comedy is both more sophisticated and more elemental than this understanding allows, evidencing what Alenka Zupančič identifies as a ‘short circuit’ between the Hegelian universal and its concrete manifestation. This understanding of the comic movement certainly correlates with awkwardness, particularly in its relation to established principles and their often-awkward actualisation. Furthermore, I argue, this correlation helps to establish the intrinsically political nature of true humour, in its elemental subversion, which is similarly carried over into the realm of awkwardness. As it emerges, not only are humour and awkwardness quite compatible after all, but they operate quite symbiotically; true humour is quite awkward, and awkwardness is innately comic.
Having established something of the structures of awkwardness, and its potential political applications, in my third chapter I shall turn to consider socio- political awkwardness as a product of the essential terms of late capitalism. Again the process moves in cycles; I shall examine specific instances of awkwardness in Curb as produced by and through the abstracted and Peter Gigg Awkwardness 12 institutionalised logic of capital, which subsequently instigate further political action. Capital, after all, subsists in the distance and movement between the ‘universal’ logic of the free market economy and its concrete manifestations. We can see, in Curb’s specific invocation of an upper-middle class milieu, an implicit critique of modern liberalism and its quite aggressive conflation of neoliberal and neoconservative values. Curb demonstrates the essential contradictions and inequalities afforded through Capital’s relentless expansion, and embraces the awkwardness inherent to this self-evisceration. This is saved from outright nihilism by way of the viewer’s self-identification with the (admittedly stylised) society depicted. After all, the first step towards enacting productive change is identifying one’s own reliance upon and complicity with institutionalised structures of inequality and oppression, which the movement-distance of awkwardness allows.
This is then a study which examines both the stultifying effects of awkwardness, and its positive potentials. In its evidencing of a more elemental realm of experience ‘beneath’ the super-structure of our postmodern society, awkwardness hints at alternate modes of comporting oneself, pointing to the chinks in capital’s apparently impenetrable armour. The ethics of the awkward can be briefly surmised in closing, with Larry’s irreducible awkwardness a persistent challenge to the seemingly hegemonic terms of the everyday. In embracing awkwardness, and perhaps regressing into it, we might envisage a more authentic conception of authenticity, and ourselves as its conduits.
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 13
Chapter 1 – Existential Awkwardness In a rare moment of humanity, Larry David makes a new friend. Struggling with the coin mechanism on a newspaper vending machine, he welcomes the assistance of a passing stranger, who assures him that he has “the magic touch”. The stranger lives up to his promise – the newspaper is freed – and in making conversation, admits to Larry that he is a huge fan of Seinfeld, “probably the biggest fan … I loved that show … I miss it.” Larry naturally enjoys the stranger’s praise (or at least the change it makes from the various permutations of “bald asshole” he usually receives), but his pleasure is curtailed by his knowledge that a convicted sex offender has moved to the neighbourhood. This amicable stranger certainly matches his neighbours’ descriptions (“This is very bad for the bald community … if he’s going too be a sex offender, I’d rather he had a full head of hair”), yet Larry can scarcely muster any degree of ill-feeling towards him; he just seems very nice. This resounding positivity continues across their next chance meetings: the stranger, now introduced as Rick, assists Larry with his groceries and, bonding over a shared enthusiasm for golf, invites him home to practice his swing with the aid of his novel backyard camera system. The tone shifts only when Rick pointedly inquires as to Larry’s plans for the forthcoming Passover:
Larry: Oh, just having some people over. Rick: Really? Larry: Yeah ... what are you doing? Rick: Nothing … nothing … … Totally free. Larry: [Extended pause, shifting from foot to foot.] You … you want to come to my house?
The moment is typical of Larry’s many awkward social interactions, yet this particular exchange (and the rest of the episode, “The Seder”) exemplifies the awkward moment as the conflation of apparently non-compatible societal norms. These 'norms' are the oft-cited yet rarely-challenged terms of acceptable (and unacceptable) conduct which contribute to our understanding of a collective ‘society’; human beings as organised around shared or compatible Peter Gigg Awkwardness 14 social norms. Noell Carroll explains that “we are bound together by shared assumptions” (77), and that “this constellation of norms also goes by the name ‘culture’”(84). As such, a subject of ‘civilised’ (western) society is continually forced to navigate the terms of these naturalised laws, even when they directly contradict one another. Larry’s nervy discomfort is a product of this, his partial compliance with variously contradictory social ‘laws’. On the one hand, he knows that it is generally frowned upon to invite sexual criminals around for intimate family-religious events. On the other, Rick appears entirely harmless – his is one of the few examples of another person extending genuine goodwill towards Larry and, as a fellow Jew, he feels a certain obligation to help integrate his new neighbour into the community. The internalised antagonism consumes Larry for the remainder of the episode, not aided by the inevitably reactionary judgements from his peers and family:
Cheryl: You invited a sex offender over for Seder!? Are you out of your mind!? Larry: Well, it was kind of an awkward moment...
Semi-unwittingly, Larry has extrapolated the basic structure of these recurring awkward ‘set-pieces’ that pepper Curb: the conflict between two or more societally-shared ’norms,’ which are nominally incompatible, despite Larry’s protestations. Such is the nature of the show, and David’s skill in devising such locus-points of the awkward, that Larry is necessarily doomed to social ‘failure’ from the outset. A full commitment to either position will generate further offence and discomfort, and thus Larry can only assume a degree of partial compliance, which serves to generate further angst through this awareness of his own nonconformity.
These impossible cyclicisms ground the mode of awkwardness in a basic anxiety, an anxiety which doubles back on itself when one becomes anxious about one’s own initial anxiety. This is then anxiety in Martin Heidegger’s existential sense, the “wholesale collapse of familiarity [wherein] everyday familiarity collapses” (232-233), or an all-consuming, directionless, fear which discloses social structures and institutions as vacuous and arbitrary – typically Peter Gigg Awkwardness 15
“inauthentic” modes of being. Since fear is primarily object-directed and future- oriented (we are typically fearful of some fearful object or event, occurring in the relatively near future), anxiety (an objectless fear experienced in the present tense) is a contradictory response to a situation of contradictions. Anxiety is not directed towards any object or institution in particular, but rather towards the configuration of western society, and its dependable ability to produce moments which do not make ‘sense’, or stipulate a ‘correct’ course of action. If it is the “constellation of norms” which constitutes society by establishing something of a collective will, anxiety reveals this will as inconsistent and arbitrary.
In theorising awkwardness it can be easy to read it simply as anxiety, or a mode of anxiety – a generalised sense of discordance and social incongruence, and an awareness of one’s difference from the ’norm’. Awkwardness and anxiety evidently share a certain internal logic, but then differ in terms of their affect. An understanding of the workings of anxiety is necessary to theorise awkwardness at the level of our basic ontology, but awkwardness somehow flouts the epistemological ‘choice’ inherent to Heidegger’s anxiety. As this chapter shall argue, awkwardness can be read as a response to the existential condition of anxiety, mirroring its structures through a distinctive oscillatory movement which comes to form the ‘essence’ of our awkward experience. Heidegger uses anxiety as means to distinguish between his existential categories of the “authentic” (a turning away from collective will) and “inauthentic” (an embrace of the collective will) as the moment when the subject must necessarily ‘choose’ one or the other. Awkwardness presents moments of anxiety wherein this ‘choice’ is variously denied or blocked, and the subject becomes locked in an exponentially anxious cycle.
But first, let us examine the correlations between awkwardness and anxiety. Anxiety itself belongs to the "non-specific" branch of emotions which, “aim less at some specific object as the fetish of their desire than at the configuration of the world in general, or at the future disposition of the self” (Bloch in Ngai 74- 75). Since it points to the contrived nature of our guiding norms and principles, effectively problematising our ‘reality,’ it can be quite hard to pinpoint exactly Peter Gigg Awkwardness 16 what anxiety is, echoing the slippery nature of the awkward. Indeed, “anxiety is amorphous, a stultifying fog that comes from nothing and nowhere specific […] part of what makes it anxiety is that nothing specific triggers it (Braver 65, emphasis mine). The “nothing specific” is of particular interest, since it speaks of a generalised fear, a dissatisfaction not with any particular institution as its target, but a dissatisfaction with the complete contemporary “Situation,” ie. “not a specific event but rather every event” (Žižek Living in the End Times 56.):
Heidegger searches for the “right mood,” that is, the mood that most effectively brings to light the oppressive, disturbing character of existence, and for this reason examines anxiety, a primordial state of Dasein’s attunement. Anxiety reveals existence as a phenomenon that eludes all attempts to explain and control it, thus opening up the fundamental elements of Dasein’s existence (Magrini 78)
Anxiety is thus the somewhat-paradoxical form of an object-centered feeling (fear) lacking an object, such that “anxiety is anxious about being-in-the-world as such” (Critchley). In experiencing anxiety, the subject indirectly grasps the nullity of being, the existential “falling” in which the inauthentic majority are caught, blinkered by their false desires and reliance upon codifying ‘rules’ of social engagement. In this way, anxiety requires (indeed, depends upon) a knowledge of its normative ‘Other', the mass of Heidegger’s “they-selves” acting under the guise of a collective ‘will,’ and experiences the distance separating self and other both in and as moments of anxiety. Thus, anxiety has a built-in guilt quotient, as the subject recognises the normative path of experience and becomes increasingly self-conscious of their inability to ‘be normal’. In Curb there are countless examples of the supporting cast (usually Cheryl) calling Larry out on his behaviour or opinions, imploring “why can’t you just be normal?” or variations thereof which serve to compound Larry’s neuroses by drawing further anxious attention to them. In the previous example, Larry’s initial angst in debating the ‘right’ course of action is exacerbated by Cheryl’s inevitable negative response: “you do not invite a sex offender over to dinner without talking to me first!” with the implication that he must be mentally deficient to do so. Accordingly, one principle (that sex offenders are not welcome Peter Gigg Awkwardness 17 house guests) takes precedence over the other, although the reasons for this are not qualified – they just simply ‘are’. This reflects something of the bureaucracy of Neoliberalism, wherein these “bureaucratic procedures float freely, independent of any external authority; but that very autonomy means that they assume a heavy implacability, a resistance to any amendment or questioning” (Fisher 50). Cheryl, who we can take as acting in accordance with conventional societal will, enforces this rationality, transmuting it into an objective stance: ‘we’re not having a sex offender over for dinner. No.”
Heidegger warns us to be skeptical of such appeals to ‘common sense’ or self- evidentiality, since “the tradition that in this way becomes dominant, far from making what it ‘transmits’ accessible, initially and for the most part conceals it, It delivers over what has been handed down to obviousness and blocks access to the primordial ‘sources’ from which the traditional categories and concepts were … drawn” (21). Moments of anxiety, such as Larry’s quandary, work to critique ‘common sense’ axioms and consequently tend towards more ‘primordial’ aspects of our being by pointing to the conceitedness of Western standards of ‘normality’.
This particular instance also exemplifies the means by which we generate “unpleasurable feelings about [our] unpleasurable feelings” (Ngai 10) in a vicious cycle of negativity – no matter which he chooses, Larry is bound to feel bad about it. Furthermore, in Cheryl’s attempt to combat Larry’s angst by stipulating what she perceives to be the ‘right’ action (not inviting sex offenders to dinner, apparently), she only facilitates the process wherein “feelings may be formed and even ’shaped’ by the means used to project, discharge, or ‘expel’ them” (ibid 222). That is to say, in attempting to ‘correct’ his anxiety, Cheryl only draws further attention to Larry’s deviation from the accepted norm, propagating his angst indefinitely. Since it has no external object, anxiety then works to locate the necessary ‘flaw’ as internal, prompting the anxious subject to police themselves more strictly by reflexively encouraging them to feel anxious Peter Gigg Awkwardness 18 about their anxiety. This motion is akin to that which Freud identifies in arguing “the price we pay for civilisation is a loss of happiness through the heightening of our sense of guilt” (134), positing anxiety as a tool to be wielded in late capitalist governmentality, deliberately cultivating a panoptic sense of the self as under constant scrutiny. Much in the same way as Michel Foucault’s disciplinary structure relies on the potential of one’s being surveilled, the anxious subject knows that they are always open to the negative judgement of others, whatever they do.
Likewise, in the spheres of late capitalism, we have witnessed a shift away from the traditional-religious idealisms of capital, promising fulfillment and redemption through the tribulations of hard work. Now we confront only the “permanent threat of the apocalypse” (Jones 30), be it environmental, economic or social, with Western governments promising only to stave off the impending doom as best they can for as long as possible (Beck). Naturally, the constant reminder of our potentially immediate demise is a source of anxiety, and an invitation to instigate more openly conservative means of government. This compounds various facets of what Alenka Zupančič terms "bio-morality,” (5) the societal norm which insists that “a person who feels good is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person […] the unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt already on the level of their base life”. The anxious subject is then encouraged to perceive their being as ‘lacking,’ in its non- accordance with the norm. When Larry retorts “I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish,” he has unwittingly disclosed this process; it is not his Jewishness which is at fault, it is the fault of a society which consistently reprimands its outliers on an existential level – to both punish and engineer a basic self-hatred in the same movement. Thus, the anxious (and by extension, awkward) subject maintains a perpetual awareness of the ‘norms’ from which they deviate, but can never properly inhabit them. Anxiety effectively 'other-ises’ the self.
Perhaps it is useful to think of anxiety as a structuring principle which destructures thought and experience, opening up the Peter Gigg Awkwardness 19 necessary ontological space for the awkward subject to navigate. And yet, despite its principally negative connotations, this state of anxiety is a necessary stage in the subject’s ascension to Heidegger’s authenticity, as an “understanding state of mind in which Dasein has been disclosed to itself in some distinctive way” (Heidegger 226). Dasein is Heidegger’s authentic subject, “ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being” (11). Indeed, the mode of “care” integral to Dasein has echoes in the awkward subject’s engagement with structuring ‘norms’, visible in Larry David’s persistent skepticism towards established social codes. Although we might think it a something of a stretch to consider Larry as Dasein, given his open narcissism, we are reminded of “the most important thing we learned about Dasein” (Braver 68) – that its very being is an issue for it, constantly drawing his attention in a world rife with distractions (Heidegger 32). Maybe, given his lack of material concerns, the only thing really occupying Larry is his own “being,” and those “unwritten rules” which set the parameters of appropriateness in society. Whereas Seinfeld was often termed a “show about nothing”, we might understand Curb Your Enthusiasm as a show about being, at once about nothing in particular, and everything in general.
Anxiety is then the means by which Heidegger differentiates the authentic from the inauthentic. Inauthenticity amounts to a manner of ascribing to the collective will of the generalised mass of “they-selves,” subjects happy to assume the bland “they-ness” of majority rule, “moving along passively with the ebb and flow of things” (Magrini 79). As such, authenticity is an existential “possibility that has been seized on and chosen by the Dasein itself” (Heidegger 287), a decisive reaction to anxiety, with its intense (and specifically chosen) individualism spurring a myriad of awkward situations in the face of blanket inauthenticity. That said, it is problematic to think of Larry as inherently ‘authentic’. Although there are certainly elements of authenticity to Larry’s general comportment, at least in his reliable “turning away” from normative will, it would be a mistake to think of his being as wholly that of Dasein. In Heidegger’s terms, the ultimate ‘meaning’ of Dasein’s being-in-the-world is his mode of “care,” his unique combination (afforded through anxiety) of “facticity” (an understanding the Peter Gigg Awkwardness 20 world as informed by our lived experiences and decisions) and “projection,” the ability to ‘project’ oneself onto the potentials of one’s being, such that Dasein is always “ahead of itself … ‘beyond itself’” (Heidegger 236).
Larry both demonstrates this mode of care, and problematises it through the resultant generation of awkwardness. When he runs into some vague acquaintances, he asks if their adopted Chinese daughter has shown “any proclivity for chopsticks,” and is surprised at their offended response. Of course, this is an entirely inappropriate thing to ask, such as it makes quite racist assumptions of a very young child (when pressed if she would fare better with chopsticks than an “American” infant, the father points out that Larry has assumed the white American as “the control group” in this case). And yet, this is an adequate moment of authentic Heideggerian care: Larry’s well-intentioned racism depends upon his understanding of the world’s facticity (that Chinese people use chopsticks more than Western/white people) as well as a certain projection (in imagining and engaging with this other being’s future being). Naturally, the parents express their reticence to this line of enquiry and quickly extricate themselves from this situation. Are we to understand that they are consequently inauthentic, and we should be more racist towards infants? Of course not – but herein lies a situation wherein Larry’s quasi-authenticity produces only a situation of further angst. This is just one of many examples whereby Larry demonstrates behaviour which is categorically authentic by means of his care, but inauthentic in its reliance on arbitrary structures, misinformation, or simple correlation mistaken for causation. “Facticity,” that which we understand of the material basis of the world, can be quite contingent, a synthesis of arbitrary norms unto itself. The simple choice between authenticity and falling is revealed to be not so simple after all, and a singular action or perspective can be a conflation of both.
Indeed it seems entirely self-aggrandising (at least to a degree not befitting Larry David) for the executive producer and lead writer of a long-running sitcom to postulate himself as a model of authentic being. Likewise it is difficult to perceive of Curb as essentially prescriptive; David and the show’s creators are hardly Peter Gigg Awkwardness 21 arguing that the world would be a better place if we were free to carpool with prostitutes, or comment on the size of children’s genitals (however impressive) – we are certainly laughing at Larry as much as we are laughing with him. Despite this, Larry is decidedly not joining the many "they-selves" in their collective “falling,” and preoccupation with inauthentic concerns and mores. This suggests as a response to existential angst which is neither resolute authenticity nor inauthenticity, but which requires a basic knowledge of each position. Somewhere in this distance, we find awkwardness.
Still, it is through these anxious underpinnings that we might begin to consider awkwardness in terms of its positively generative potential, as a flexible mode of critique. These “expectation emotions” evidence a fundamental dissatisfaction with the terms of the everyday, and work to isolate moments of contradiction and inconsistency in the fabric of our dominant ideology. As such, it does not level criticism directly, nor does it suggest corresponding re-action, but this doesn’t make it any less pertinent. As Raymond Williams explains, “it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error” (129) - it would be principally reductive to reject the “fixed forms” of societal norms, only to insist on different norms taking their place.
Much like anxiety, we can consider awkwardness as something of a ‘meta-mood’. That is, it is a feeling/affect unto itself, but also the means by which other feelings (and further awkwardness) emerge and develop. Despite an evident causal correlation, I think it is a categorical mistake to read awkwardness and anxiety as the same thing. Angst might underpin the experience of awkwardness, but one could hardly describe a given social faux pas, or an uncomfortable social event as "a bit anxious” – awkwardness is something more developed, and problematic. It is not so much a distinct turning away from social norms as a simultaneous partial compliance and partial rejection. Likewise, though Larry is typically angst-ridden his angst more often than not has an object, from the ejaculate-stained comforter in his guest bedroom to Christian Slater’s overly- aggressive caviar technique. If anxiety is an object-oriented emotion lacking its object, then awkwardness is perhaps the even-more-contradictory case of an Peter Gigg Awkwardness 22 object-oriented emotion lacking a true object, but channeling that impotent angst into/towards a pseudo object. This external object reflects the outward projection of the subject’s internal antagonisms, evidencing “a quality or feeling the subject refuses to recognise in himself and attempts to locate in another person or thing” (Ngai 210). The object then becomes an outlet for the levied anxiety the awkward subject is necessarily bearing, but always an unsatisfactory one, since the anxious fear will necessarily linger and regenerate, by way of its existential nature. The apparent insignificance of many of these objects is testament both to their inadequacy as means to offload angst, and the reverence with which western social structures treat their inconsequential terms.
In season four, Larry begrudgingly attends the funeral of Marty Funkhouser’s father. When there, he learns that the lifelong golf fan is to be buried with his beloved 5-wood, but notices (whether by accident or sabotage) that his prized club has been placed in the coffin instead. There follows an extended debate with Jeff as to the ethics of retrieving the club, with Larry reasoning, “that club’s irreplaceable, it’s ten years old […] why should this guy be buried in eternity with my club? That’s not fair!” Their conversation is effectively a debate as to the relative valence of two incompatible norms (that which deems it unacceptable to tamper with a dead body at a public wake, and that which deems it unjust to bury someone else with a valuable item which belongs to you), with the latter ultimately taking precedence, and Larry deciding to take decisive action. Naturally, his attempts to discreetly remove the club go quickly awry, and, in a moment of quite sublime awkwardness, Larry is caught trying to prise a golf club from the rigor-mortis grip of a corpse. We can see here the convergence of various registers of anxiety here (the social obligation to attend the funeral of someone you don’t care for, the obvious waste of burying someone with a useful item, the impossibility of voicing such concerns, etc.) upon this singular object. This awkwardness then isn’t anxiety per se, but rather a developed response to anxiety, and its reflexive patterning – and one quite distinct from the binary “choice” between authenticity and inauthenticity as advanced by Heidegger. Anxiety is certainly the impetus for the initial quandary, disclosing the reverence with which we hold the deceased (particularly when Peter Gigg Awkwardness 23 they are closely related to us) as arbitrary, but it is the weighted effect of multiply converging anxieties which constitutes awkwardness. When differentially prescriptive axioms subsist in the same moment (or object), the subject’s recourse to the ‘correct’ action is denied.
Neat as Heidegger’s explication seems, the central dialectic of authenticity is too reductive: the subject only has the binary choice whether or not to “choose themselves”. To my mind, the awkward subject recognises the inauthenticity of their situation but is variously unable to make the necessary ‘choice’ so as to grasp their own authenticity. We can understand this as the result of multiply conflating norms corrupting any tangible sense of the ‘correct’ course of action. It may be possible to turn away from inauthenticity in a singular instance, but that turn will doubtless be inauthentic relative to another position/norm. The subject consequently finds themselves in the perpetual limbo-space between authenticity and the inauthentic, which we might term the realm of awkwardness.
Indeed, the slippery nature of awkwardness points to itself as neither authentic nor inauthentic, but rather in a perpetual oscillatory movement between the two. The question of “choice” is central to Heidegger’s conception of the authentic; one can essentially choose whether or not "to choose oneself” (Magrini 78). While this is the means by which “anxiety holds the potential for enlightenment” (ibid. 77) it is a simple binary distinction between authenticity and its inverse. If the subject is variously unable to even make that ‘choice,’ they become mired in an ever-expanding realm of anxiety. What we see in awkwardness is the subject falling (in the non-Heideggerian sense) into the ontic ‘gap’ implicit in this choice – the space in between authenticity and inauthenticity. Crucially, awkwardness isn’t just located in this gap, it fundamentally is this gap, comprising a perpetual motion between the poles of authenticity. If anxiety problematises being, then awkwardness is a meta-anxiety, problematising the implicit ‘choice’ and mimicking its effects as (and in) response.
This is the root experience of awkwardness as response to anxiety: a turning Peter Gigg Awkwardness 24 away from inauthenticity, but a turn which never comes to rest. It is not so much a ‘falling’ amid the many they-selves but a constant turning amid the boundaries of the self. We are reminded that “although it is [Dasein’s] nature as the clearing to reveal reality, [he will] constantly fall back into dissembling and superficial ways of doing so” (Braver 74) and must then realign himself with the authentic. The awkward subject exists precisely in this motion – although they might reach for the authentic (or long for the blissful ignorance of absolute inauthenticity), it remains quite ungraspable. If anxiety works to generate further anxiety through the subject’s awareness of their own anxiety, this logic of redoubling is prevalent in awkwardness as an effect of anxiety. At some point, the exponential growth of this anxiety effectively becomes awkwardness, locking the subject into an impotent malaise and nullifying any question of their ‘choice,’ since it is impossible to ’turn away’ from that which has already overtaken you. To return to our spatial metaphors, the awkward subject is constantly turning away from the inauthenticity of normative being and collective/societal wills. However, if we understand our society and contemporary political situation as essentially anxiety-producing, the turning subject naturally encounters further sources of inauthenticity (and therefore anxiety) throughout the motion of the turn. Then, in their basic striving towards authenticity, the turn continues – now away from another locus of anxiety, only to encounter more angst in the process.
To give another example, in “The Black Swan” episode, Larry overhears his cousin Andy complaining to his wife of their various financial woes, and selflessly offers to pay their daughter’s college tuition fees, reasoning that he has ample finances and no dependents of his own. Andy and his wife are naturally flattered and graciously accept Larry’s offer. Here we can see Larry attempting to ‘do the right thing’ by turning away from the collective will of a society which stipulates only the active pursuit of private, monetary gain. On a quite basic level, he is rejecting the terms of normative late capitalist society and ‘choosing to choose himself,’ in rejecting the will of the many they-selves. Furthermore, he is striving to neutralise the angst of the situation – produced in turn by the ‘ugly feeling’ of greed or selfishness in not offering to contribute when one is able. However, his apparent pleasure in the gesture is swiftly curtailed when Andy Peter Gigg Awkwardness 25 later attempts to re-negotiate Larry’s offer, suggesting that he might instead like to pay to put his wife through cosmetology school, much to Larry’s chagrin: “We don’t even know if Skylar’s going to go to college. I’m not saying it wasn’t a beautiful gesture, but who knows? She might be a drug addict…” Herein lies the impossible cycle of awkwardness; in turning away from anxiety Larry has only encountered another source of angst, which he turns away from again – now withdrawing his offer completely in offence – as the pattern repeats indefinitely. What initially made Larry merely anxious, is now approaching awkwardness proper.
If Dasein is “essentially in both the truth and the untruth” (Braver 23), then the awkward subject is somewhere in between, in both the truth, the untruth, and, most pertinently, what lies in between. Thus the “distinct kind of knowledge- seeking subject” (Ngai 215) which this specific ugly feeling produces both tends towards and away from Dasein in its relation to authenticity. Indeed, the distinct knowledge sought is a means of ratification beyond the reductive terms of conventional right and wrong, or a ‘being’ beyond the restrictive terms of the authentic and inauthentic. Considering that Dasein is the being for whom their own being poses an issue, awkwardness can be read as a unique problematisation of the being of the being for whom being is a problem.
These awkward moments evidence the inadequacy of our normative social structures, by locating moments of ideological ‘breakdown,’ the points at which our conventional understanding of the world is insufficient. To take a momentary step back, Heidegger uses the example of a tool, or piece of functional equipment, to demonstrate the processes of disclosure, which draws our attention to an entity amid its complex network of interrelations so as to properly situate its being-in-the-world (103). When the tool (be it a hammer, hacksaw or iPhone) functions properly, it seamlessly blends into its contextual world and we think nothing of it, reality simply ‘is’ as it ‘is’. When everything runs smoothly, or attention is not drawn to individual components, we see only the system as a cohesive whole. However, when the tool fails down or ceases to function, it discloses the whole network of other entities in which it is Peter Gigg Awkwardness 26 situated. When the hammer breaks, we suddenly become more acutely aware of the workbench, the steel nails, the project which cannot be completed and their necessary inter-dependence (and when the iPhone runs out of battery, we are very aware of the important email we cannot send, or the abject tedium of conversations aboard public transport).
Importantly, we can consider ourselves, as human-tools, as bound to this same process; “like equipment we are inconspicuous: going about our daily tasks involves virtually no attention to ourselves” (Braver 65). The moment of anxiety is akin to the failing of the tool – the lapse in our being, in the social order, discloses the entirety of our contemporary situation, and our dizzying network of dependences. Likewise, the self-consciousness generated in the anxious moment is a means of disclosing the self, separating it in its failure to cohere from the 'falling’ masses. If falling is a “fleeing” of Dasein from itself, anxiety is the forced encounter with the self: “what [anxiety] does is precisely to bring Dasein […] face to face with itself as Being-in-the-World” (Heidegger 233). Yet, in turn, awkwardness comes to represent the failing of the tool-mechanism of anxiety, at least in its postulation of real emancipatory choice. Awkwardness discloses the inadequacy of reducing the entirety of social experience to ‘normative and ‘non-normative,’ or ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic’. Ironically, awkwardness, through its relation to anxiety, works to disclose the inauthenticity of Heidegger’s binary authenticity.
It is in this (semi-convoluted) way that “the world as world is disclosed first and foremost by anxiety” (232) and our material reality is revealed as just that – material, lacking in any spiritual order or significance. Anxiety comes first and then awkwardness inevitably follows. Awkwardness is simultaneously a product of existential anxiety, a reaction to it, and an essential problematisation of its logic. It is all very well to demand that the authentic subject must choose to choose itself, but awkwardness evidences a situation where this “choice” is not made available. In “The Car Pool Lane” episode, Larry embarks on a circuitous quest to procure marijuana to relieve his father’s glaucoma. After first hiring a prostitute to take advantage of the car pool lane and skip the queue outside the Peter Gigg Awkwardness 27
Dodgers’ stadium, he presents his father with some particularly potent marijuana as recommended by ‘Monena’ (“This is chronic, okay? It’s gonna clear your daddy’s eye problem and shit. We gonna hook daddy up.”). After they have partaken, Larry becomes withdrawn and paranoid, retreating from Monena’s ribald conversation to the bathroom. There begins a minor comic set piece where Larry “confronts” himself in the mirror. Except, it is not one self he confronts, but rather a multiplicity, his various neuroses sparring with each other in the literalisation of his internal conflict(s) (“Are you afraid to get a colonoscopy? What’s the matter with you” “I’m sorry!” “Everyone gets it! Get a colonoscopy!” “I…I I’m really gonna do it…”). Although played for broad laughs, the scene highlights the basic failure of the authentic moment: it is impossible to turn and confront the ‘self’ if the self has been fragmented and disenfranchised by the terms of contemporary society and its intersections of non-compatible norms. Moreover, it demonstrates that “the idea of the individual as we commonly think about it is a mistake of consciousness” (Gunn 96, emphasis mine), and that the fixed self is really just another “constellation of norms,” – as malleable as it is tenuous.
While preventing an effectively authentic self-ascension, this oscillatory movement could be considered more productive in that it somewhat discredits Heidegger’s division between authenticity and normative being, or ‘falling’. Awkwardness subsists in the gap implicit in this division, ironically informing a more ‘authentic’ conception of the authentic by demonstrating its essential inauthenticity. We see in Larry an essential problematisation of Dasein, the being whose being is already problematic for it, as he spins around the terms of the authentic and inauthentic. Larry’s being is certainly an issue for him, but that issue is not to be resolved through any recourse to authenticity. The category of inauthenticity is still quite applicable, and the awkward subject certainly distanciates themselves from it, but not completely or categorically. Theirs is a moment of recognition, but an impotent one which can never be resolved, at least not without a thorough re-evaluation of the terms of normative experience. Its generative potential is still implicit, but as an essential critique, as an understanding of one’s own (self-and societally-imposed) restrictions, rather Peter Gigg Awkwardness 28 than a means to surmount them. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 29
Chapter 2 - Awkward Comedy It would be hard to deny that Curb Your Enthusiasm is funny. One cannot recall instances such as Larry choking on a pubic hair, or accidentally submitting an obituary that reads “beloved cunt,” without at least cracking a smile. Regardless of its generic ‘situation-comedy’ trappings, Curb frequently produces a general experience of ‘mirth,’ or comic amusement. And yet, in its staging of the comedic both alongside and through the awkward, Curb problematises a basic understanding of the function(s) of comedy. On the face of it, general conceptions of comedy appear incompatible with our understanding of the awkward. Comedy is something we typically enjoy, and we strive for the momentary “levity” (Carroll 50) and existential escapism it affords. Awkwardness, on the other hand, is a specifically “ugly” feeling (Ngai 1), as it produces “negative,” specifically “unpleasurable” (10) effects in its subjects, which we might ordinarily wish to avoid.
There is a basic discordance on a structural level too – humour is object-oriented and generally occurs after the fact. We experience something specific (an object, joke, person etc.) as humorous after we have cognitively processed it and selected humour as the appropriate response (Carroll 27). Awkwardness is both more generalised, according to its existential basis in anxiety, and experienced in the present, as a pervasive sense of one’s inability to properly comply with the terms of society and social interaction. What, then, explains comedy’s frequent use of awkwardness as a source of humour, and what reasons are there for the contemporary emergence of the awkward-comedy (sometimes referred to as ‘cringe’ comedy) genre (Middleton 2)?
As this chapter shall argue, the terms of awkwardness are not as distinct from those of humour as they might appear. It emerges that a thorough understanding of the nature and workings of what we term ‘humour’ is essential to an understanding of the socio-political potentials of awkwardness, their parallel developments depending upon a careful navigation between societal norms and their incongruities. All too often, comedy is considered purely in terms of it dispositional effects, identifiable in anything which produces laughter or the felt Peter Gigg Awkwardness 30 inclination toward it. A structural approach is more valuable both in terms of its correlation with the awkward and its political potential. Similarly, an understanding of awkwardness affords a more rigorous consideration of the nature of humour, allowing us to identify a disparity between ‘true’ and ‘false’ branches. In turn, we see a necessary interplay between the two experiential categories, such that each begins to constitute the other. But first, let us consider the assumed operations of comedy.
In and of itself, comedy is hard to theoretically identify4; we might broadly postulate that anything which produces an inclination towards laughter might be considered comic, yet Curb will often bely this, scenarios generating moments of squirming discomfort rather than ribald laughter. A broad explanation for this affective division comes from Noel Carroll, who identifies moments of perceived incongruity (that is deviation from expected norms) as generating either anxiety or humour in subjects:
What is key to comic amusement is a deviation, from some presupposed norm – that is to say, an anomaly or incongruity relative to some framework governing the ways in which we think the world is or should be […] because we assume so many congruities or norms in order to wend our way through the world, there an indeterminately large number of things that are potentially perceivable as incongruous […] comic amusement comes with the apprehension of incongruity (17-19, emphasis mine).
Importantly, the participating subject “must regard the incongruity not as a source of anxiety but rather as an opportunity to relish its absurdity” (27, emphasis mine). This extends humour as something of a cognitive choice, a mitigating response to a potentially traumatic challenge to the symbolic order. From this we can understand humour as a function of Foucault’s governmentality (Power 219), a means to internalise contradictions, reduce them to the baser level of ‘humour’ so as to neuter potential agency and distract attention from structural inequalities and inconsistencies. Similarly, there is a
4 Problematic definitions are becoming something of a recurring theme. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 31 self-policing quality to this process in that it “presupposes that the audience has a working knowledge of all the congruities – concepts, rules, expectations – that the humour in question disturbs or violates; and perhaps part of the pleasure of humour involves exercising our ability to access this background information (Carroll 27). This echoes Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of ‘false laughter’, wherein “fun is a medicinal bath […] it makes laughter the instrument of fraud practiced on happiness […] laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it in to its worthless totality” (141). We should then be naturally distrustful of our own sense of humour, since, in delighting in the social disturbance of comedy, one can indirectly reinforce the structures from which the instance deviates - and we are thus conditioned to experience this process of our own subjectification as innately pleasurable.
Furthermore, this incongruous definition is seemingly quite incompatible with the pre-ontic anxiety underpinning awkwardness. If, when faced with the real of incongruity, we must make the ontological ‘choice’ between anxiety and humour, then the category of awkward comedy is contradictory by definition5. This is exacerbated by the notion of anxiety as self-perpetuating, that the self- awareness of anxiety produces an anxiety about one’s own anxiety (Ngai 10) – surely this exponential pursuit of anxiety through the awkward guarantees its non-comic register? I would argue that Curb operates in a realm one step removed from this basic theory of incongruity-management, a more wryly sophisticated comedy which “lives in the same world as its definitions and is quite capable of its own definitions as material to be submitted to further comic treatment” (Zupančič 3). Frequently, Curb draws upon the societal terms of what is and what is not considered funny as the locus of further comic potential. In the season six episode ‘The Freak Book,’ Larry attends Ted Danson’s birthday party and gives him a book of circus freaks as a gift. While initially believing the book to be universally hysterical (encouraged, inevitably, by Jeff), Ted and the other guests find the present entirely distasteful and ostracise Larry from the group. Ironically, this discordance between the funny and the unfunny becomes a social incongruity in itself.
5 Not to mention awkwardness’ problematisation of binary ‘choice’. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 32
While the incident is nominally funny in its coalescence of civility and depravity, it is also deeply uncomfortable, as anyone who has ever misjudged the appropriateness of a risqué joke will recognise. In terms of the audience’s own comic experience, they are never actually shown the contents of the book, merely invited to speculate on what they might be like. This means that the comic object, or locus of comedic affect, is not the book itself but the distinction as to whether it is funny or not. It is this ‘boundary’ of the comic that is the true object, as Curb evidences the reflexive nature of its humour. As such, the junction between the humorous and the anxiety-producing becomes a site of meta-incongruity, and thus meta-humour – to some extent re-validating Carroll’s initial distinctions.
Carroll extends this model of incongruity with other ‘auxiliary’ modes of humour, so as to nuance and extend its applicability. Derived from Plato and Aristotle’s identification of a malicious trait in all humour, there is the “Superiority Theory,” whereby “laughter results from perceiving infirmities in others which reinforce our own sense of superiority” (8). This is the basis of comic tropes such as racial stereotyping or political jibes, engineered to reinforce one’s social position. This is evident to some extent in Curb, with many comic situations depending on our identification with Larry’s take on the given issue, as opposed to the more common perspective assumed by the general population. However, as Carroll admits, this theory does not accord with the mode of self-deprecation integral to Curb’s brand of awkward. In the previous example, the audience is further amused by the inappropriateness of the gift and invited to laugh at Larry’s social ineptitude. It would be hard to qualify this as a moment of any true superiority – and Larry is so often cast as the inferior party in any instance. Besides, the trope of male “inadequacy” is too prevalent throughout postmodern modes of ‘Jewish’ humour, with which Curb accords (Aarons and Mierowsky 170), for the superiority theory to be valid here. Likewise, his situation doesn’t especially evidence the “Release Theory” - the Freudian understanding of humour as a means to “liberate the energy expended by rationality to repress both infantile nonsense and tendentious feelings” (Carroll 38). Indeed, this Peter Gigg Awkwardness 33 typically awkward moment focuses on the act of social repression; there is no grand liberation, merely the subject’s humiliation. The vaguest notion of release accompanies Larry’s voicing the unsayable (or gifting the ungiftable), but it is hardly a site of ideological ‘freedom’.
The ‘Dispositional Theory’ comes closest to articulating the comic thrust of Curb, but only by virtue of its broad applicability. Largely credited to Jerold Levinson, this states that humour cannot be detached from a “felt inclination, however faint, towards the convulsive bodily expression of laughter” (44). This is of course a theory of humour’s effect rather than analysis of its structural workings. Moreover, if we understand laughter as the bodily effect of the humorous experience, then this definition is tautology; it is insufficient to simply claim that which produces the effects of humour is itself humour. This is further problematic due to the flexibility in interpreting an “inclination,” but it does at least provide a more democratic basis of comedy, essentially that, “whatever makes you want to laugh can be considered comedy.” Might Curb’s humour be considered in line with this, not always producing outright laughter, but reliably generating an inclination towards it? This partially withdraws humour from being held as some societally-regulated code and shifts it to an internalised practice, unique to one’s subject position. Despite the reassuring subjectivity of this argument, we are reminded that “it is only when we laugh and breathe freely that ideology truly has a hold on us” (Dolar qtd. in Zupančič 4). What can manifest itself as one’s unique ‘sense of humour’ can be the intentional result of strategies of governmentality, working to “correct men by amusement” (Moliere, qtd. in Carroll, 79). Viewed this way, the levity pursued in acts of comedy is reduced to “part of the technique of learning social practices and discouraging impractises” (Billig, 199). Again, the Freak Book episode proffers this learning process (as the other guests work to “discourage” the “impractice” of Larry’s faux pas by not reacting humorously) as a comic subject unto itself, a wider example of a comic form reflexively identifying the terms of its own humour as grounds for further amusement.
This leaves Carroll with the somewhat cumbersome definition of comic Peter Gigg Awkwardness 34 amusement as the mental state wherein,
(i) the object of one’s mental state is a perceived incongruity which (ii) one regards as non-threatening or otherwise anxiety producing, and (iii) not annoying and (iv) towards which one does not enlist genuine problem-solving attitudes, (v) but which gives rise to enjoyment of precisely the pertinent incongruity and (vi) to an experience of levity (50).
Although this definition’s dependence on non-anxiety-producing situations limits its applicability, its real pertinence resides in its political quotient. If the basis of humour is experiential incongruity, then “we can begin to isolate what makes a joke funny by locating the perceived incongruity to which it compels attention” (49). In a realm of humour which depends upon the division between funny/unfunny, we are forced to identify and consider (whether directly or indirectly) the relevant incongruity so as to assess its relative comic worth. The incongruity might be anxiety-producing or mirth-inducing, but it must first be “located” before this computation can take place. In establishing its own sense of humour as trepidatious, Curb forces a critical encounter with the various norms it depicts, informing an understanding of our ‘reality’ as inconsistent and paradoxical (remember, “there an indeterminately large number of things that are potentially perceivable as incongruous” (19)). Moreover, Carroll articulates the incongruity theory as “a problematisation of sense […] when concepts or rules are violated or transgressed [… or] sense can be problematised by being stretched to the breaking point” (22). Despite Carroll’s insistences that humour must not be anxiety-producing, this “problematisation of sense” bears a remarkable correlation to the logic of anxiety, that “collapse” of “everyday familiarity” (Heidegger 233).
When the sensible is revealed in this way to be a politically-informed category, comedy emerges as an emancipatory form through its essential transgression(s). Often, Larry’s misfortunes can be considered in terms of their problematisations of ‘sense,’ either through a pointed dismissal of societal norms or pseudo-naïve reliance on their affect. In the “Vow of Silence” episode, Larry admonishes a Peter Gigg Awkwardness 35 woman for performing a “chat and cut” – making banal conversation with someone further ahead in a queue, in order to “cut” in without waiting. Similarly in “The Ida Funkhouser Roadhouse Memorial,” he loudly voices his disapproval of a patron ahead of him at an ice cream parlour for taking blatant advantage of their sampling policy. In both these instances, he protests, “she wasn’t following the rules of society […] the unwritten rules, that we have as we go about our day”. That these actions were deemed acceptable by others – and remained unchallenged – situates Curb as challenging the structures of the everyday, however petty they might seem. In turn, this demonstrates the prevalent inconsistencies in our ‘normality’; what one takes to be acceptable and rational, can from another perspective be quite the opposite.
This approaches a more concrete definition of comedy as mode of critique, which is essential if awkwardness is to be considered in any truly generative sense. Alenka Zupančič advances a more nuanced definition of the terms of comedy, hinging as they do on the “very incessant and irresistible, all-consuming movement” between the poles of humour and seriousness (2). As the example from Ted Danson’s birthday shows, it is not the offensive book which is intrinsically funny. Neither are Ted and the guest’s reactions that amusing in and of themselves, indeed they are what one might ordinarily expect if one were to present a collection of obscene images in polite company. What is funny is this “movement” between funny and not funny, the gap between Larry’s imagined reaction to his gift (shared mirth) and its actual reception (widespread disgust). We might conceptualise the awkwardness of the scene in a similar fashion; it is the gap between one’s intentions and their actualised effect that produces this specific anxiety. The effect is greater still when one believes one’s own stance on the article/object to be shared by all – assuming the quality of a social norm – only to have that assumption utterly destroyed when it is voiced. We can begin to understand awkwardness in this way as an oscillation around the terms of society’s norms, contradictory as they may be. The awkward subject thus enacts a partial compliance with various norms, but can never fully align themselves with one or the other. The necessary disjunctures point back towards the vocalising subject and locate the ‘flaw’ as internal to them, generating a certain Peter Gigg Awkwardness 36 existential awkwardness, an awareness of one’s deviation from the expected norm.
Zupančič’s understanding of comedy is on this, more elemental level, asserting the “irreducible germ of comedy” is simply “the question of how the absolute perceives himself” (19). This can be taken as the split between the “universal” and “concrete” - the gap between that which is abstract, pure, and shared (God) and that which is literal, physical and ready-to-hand (man). Through deceptively simple mechanisms, comedy enables the universal and concrete to effectively switch places, or operate concurrently, so as to both prove themselves “utterly empty and contingent” (27), thus undermining our societal norms and our very conception of the ‘real.’ Herein we see a rough equivalencing with Carroll’s incongruity theory; it is possible to read the societal norms integral to this concept as a tangent of the universal, that which remains unquestioned in our social spheres, that which simply ‘is’. Then, when these principles are brought to actualisation, they inevitably and necessarily produce incongruities and inconsistencies (as product of their pseudo-arbitrary basis) through their transition to the concrete. What separates the two theories is their consideration of politics. Carroll sees the political as subsisting in the incongruity theory purely on a level of content; incongruity can draw our attention to the inadequacies of our socio-political milieu, but only if a specific aspect or object of that milieu is the subject of the joke. In Zupančič’s explication, it is the comic movement itself that is innately political; the usurping of the universal by the concrete demonstrates the empty contingency of either category, betraying the more essential incongruity at the heart of our structured conception of ‘reality’.
As Zupančič explains, it is perhaps easier to conceive of this in reverse, through a consideration of “false” comedy, which can only ever “remain in an abstract dualism of the concrete and universal”. That is to say, ‘inauthentic’ branches of comedy can only strain to show the coexistence of some concrete, relatable, aspect within a deified subject. This brings to mind the recent trend of awards- hungry biopics, which purport to show the ‘human’ (read ‘concrete) side of some revered historical figure (in last year’s Oscar-contenders alone, see The Theory of Peter Gigg Awkwardness 37
Everything, The Imitation Game, Selma and to a lesser-but-still-pertinent extent American Sniper). As their sole source of comic levity, these films rely on depicting their ‘universal’ (ie. assumed into a societal discourse) protagonists as experiencing some mundane ‘real-world’ tribulation, or as guilty of some commonplace vice. Thus, Martin Luther King is shown to be susceptible to the perils of adultery, and Alan Turing as capable of being a bit of a dick to his coworkers. Although this might seem to have a democratic-emancipatory thrust (‘they too are human beings, and their achievements are within your reach’), it actually has the inverse effect: they are mighty despite their limitations, and the universal-ideal quotient within them is able to somehow triumph their material- concrete bounds. The concrete elements only serve to strengthen their universal status, distancing them further from the concrete, lived, experience of the audience. I consider Curb’s strength, as an ‘authentic’ comedy, in its ideological equivalencing of the universal and concrete, revealing them both as arbitrarily- conceived categories:
[True] comedy is the moment in which substance, necessity, and essence all lose their immediate – and thus abstract – self-identity or coincidence with themselves […] The substance becomes subject in the moment when, through a split in itself, it starts relating to itself. (Zupančič 34)
This is an essential re-vision of Hegel’s conception of true comedy, whereby “the actual self of the actor coincides with what he impersonates, just as the spectator is completely at home in the drama performed before him and sees himself playing in it” (452). Whereas other art forms (chiefly the epic and the tragedy) rely on propagating the dualistic split between the human and divine, the individual and universal, and the self-consciousness and lived experience, comedy fundamentally ruptures this epistemological division: "Some universality has to let a subject in all his concreteness shine through it—not as the opposite of this universal (or as its irreducible support), but as its own inherent truth, its flexibility and life” (Zupančič 37-8, emphasis mine).
Curb’s pseudo-biographical elements develop and complement this process, Peter Gigg Awkwardness 38 since the screen Larry David is not something strictly ‘impersonated’. The represented/representational selves of Larry David do not just “coincide,” they are (or at least appear to be) one and the same. In this way, the variously- nuanced references to Larry’s ‘real’ life and work inform a sense of its “inherent truth” and help establish its comic authenticity. By way of extension, the show works to incorporate later aspects of David’s real life (beyond the initial ‘set-up’), so as to effectively destabilise its own format and reinvigorate its comic authenticity. The most obvious example would be David’s divorce from his real- world wife in 2007, reflected in Larry’s separation and eventual divorce from Cheryl in season six (aired also in 2007). This throws the ‘actual self’ of David as writer-actor and Larry as character into question – if both inform the other, then the concept of an external and universally-received ‘self’ as evidenced and lived through the concrete experiences of an ageing Jewish body is demonstrably inconsistent. Indeed, any notion of a concrete self as authentically embodying the multitude of selves we construct for ourselves, and as constructed by others, is principally reductive. Semi-ironically, David’s irreducible ‘Jewishness’ (with many episodes of Curb depicting the contradictory demands and rigmarole of Jewish tradition) encapsulates this motion, since “Jews, in order to succeed in society, are forced to assimilate; but in so doing they must also reject as unworthy an aspect of themselves, which is then projected onto ‘others’” (Brook 312). In assimilating to Los Angeles life, and moving away from the ‘more Jewish’ New York (not to mention marrying a Gentile woman), Larry has necessarily ‘otherised’ his own selfhood, fragmenting his understanding of its perceived universality through its concrete manifestations in his awkward interactions with others. The contemporary Jew is perhaps a living example of the universal concrete, a subject position constructed through the conflation of universal and concrete principles (the shared imaginary of the Jew “paradoxically has symbolised both elitist intellectual privilege and bestial low culture” (Aarons and Mierowsky 173)). Larry’s self-identity, then, is grounded in his partial identification with contradictory principles, which are discredited through their emergence in concrete reality. As this comic movement demonstrates, any presumed fixity of the self is both reductive and intrinsically awkward.
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 39
There is a very amusing sequence in “The Rat Dog” in which Larry and Leon, his sometime lodger, accidentally swap mobile phones for the day. Neither party notices and unknowingly answers the other’s phone calls in spectacularly inappropriate fashion. Larry, plagued earlier by persistent cold-callers, responds bluntly to an “offer” from a finance firm, not realising that it was actually a genuine job offer for his tenant. Likewise, when Larry’s (black) acquaintance Hal returns Larry’s call so as to allow him to apologise for an earlier incident (Larry having accidentally made a masturbatory gesture in front of Hal’s deaf wife…) Leon misreads the nature of the call and, in his trademark vernacular, boasts of an unrelated sexual conquest; “[I’m a] black man doing his thing, baby … Barrack Obama, motherfucker … I’m the president of hitting that ass.” Mistaking this for Larry attempting a racist comedy accent (“You’re doing a black guy character because I’m a black guy, right?”), Hal understandably hangs up in outrage (“Fuck you, Larry!”). In this example we see the fallacy of assuming any fixed, ‘universal’, conception of the self, since it subsists in the contextual reception by other selves. It also evidences the processes by which the universal and concrete can simultaneously undermine each other; the ‘universal’ understanding of Larry’s character is jeopardised by its apparently concrete manifestation in the telephone conversation, the perceived facticity of which is usurped by the fact that Leon answers the call instead. What is crucial here is that it is the “universal aspect of a concept” (32) (ie. the imaginary construction of Larry’s self and being) which has produced the resultant “subjectivity,” in Hal. Indeed, Zupančič asks, “is not the very existence of comedy and of the comical telling us most clearly that man is never ‘just a man’?” and explains that “‘Man,’ a human being, interests comedy at the very point where the human coincides with the inhuman” (49). As David’s performance as Larry and the above example testify, ‘true’ comedy necessarily problematises our conventional sense of self and being, giving rise to the universal concrete that is the human subject. What we are invited to laugh at in this instance is the presumed fixity of self (as encouraged and enforced by an individualist society), and how its essential movement in and through the concrete demonstrates either category as “empty and contingent” (27).
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 40
True comedy thus bypasses the structure of representation, which can only ever be “a synthetic combination of the universal and the individual” (Hegel 441), since “the comic character is not the physical remainder of the symbolic representation as essence; it is this very essence as physical” (Zupančič 26). It is through our lived actions that the universal discloses itself, ironically disclosing its non-universality in the process. This is the critical thrust of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s greatest moments, in concretising supposedly universal notions and societal concepts it evidences their fallacy and redundancy, often betraying the much simpler (and, more often than not, entirely narcissistic) drive lurking beneath. It is this element which both allows us to conceive of Curb as essentially comic, despite its oft-reticence towards outright laughter, and demonstrates its critical power. We see in almost every one of Curb’s 76 episodes a process wherein “the very universal aspect of [a] concept produces its own humanity, corporeality, subjectivity (32).
To give another typically tasteless example, in the “The Korean Bookie” episode, Larry observes the titular bookkeeper’s genial interest in Jeff’s pet German shepherd, Oscar. He naturally thinks little of it until Oscar later goes missing, and he manages to convince himself that the bookie has stolen the dog in order to eat it. Larry’s suspicion obviously derives from the popular western notion that Korean people regularly consume dog meat6. This ‘universal’ concept provides the impetus for Larry’s ill-advised investigation into the dog’s disappearance, culminating in his attendance at a friend’s wedding that happens to be catered by the bookie’s family. When the realisation dawns on him – that he has just eaten his friend’s dog – Larry retches and screams at the other guests in warning, who react similarly and utterly disrupt the wedding. Of course, a few moments later Oscar is revealed to be entirely alive and well, proving Larry’s suspicions to be misguided and resulting in much chagrin when he must confess them to the wedding couple and Korean family in attendance.
Here again, the universal is usurped through its manifestation in concrete experience, and “produces its own humanity, corporeality, subjectivity” – which
6 Despite my cursory Google search reassuring me that this is a relatively rare practice. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 41 we might term the essence of awkwardness (32). It is as if Larry’s faith in this universal (which he knows to be racist, since he cannot openly confront the Koreans) manifests its own “subjectivity”, allowing him to establish causal chains where there are none. The universal appears to actualise (such as when Larry comes across the bookie eating a suspicious sandwich earlier on) but it is precisely the ‘faith’ in these apparent evidences that produces his wrongheaded discrimination, i.e. subjectivity. It is not so much that the universal is proven to be false (although it is), but that the ‘truth’ of it is disclosed in practice; that white, upper-middle-class, liberal-minded subjects can often be quite racist and conceited. Again, the comedy is not so much located in either pole in the gap/movement between them, the distance between the universal concept and its catastrophic effects. Indeed, “it is only as a concrete self that the universal comes to its own truth via the gap of self-consciousness” (38, emphasis mine).
Admittedly, it is not too great a claim to suggest that belief in widespread Korean dog consumption betrays a class-based racism, but it is only in its actualisation that “the universal itself is precisely as idiotic as its concrete and individual appearance […] the materialism of comedy is precisely [this] materialism of spirit (ibid.). Likewise, the ‘mood’ of awkwardness also rests within this void, as we saw in the freak book example. Can we then postulate that not only is awkwardness an inherently comic topic (at least in the sense of ‘true’ comedy), but that awkwardness and comedy might be one and the same thing? If not precisely the same, the two concepts share the same internal logic - that of a ‘gap’ between an established principle and its received practice. This gap is not so much a position or ideology of itself, but constituent rather of the perpetual movement between the two poles, reminiscent of awkwardness’ cyclical relation to inauthenticity and authenticity. Depending on the circumstance, this vertiginous movement produces an affective response of either levity (humour/comedy), anxiety, or a conflation of both. At its most transcendental moments (see the oft-cited “The Grand Opening” episode, when an unfortunately-timed burst of public Tourette syndrome is saved by Larry’s deliberately profane response, mitigating the situation by constructing a space of mutual awkwardness), Curb stages a synthesis of these two ‘moods,’ such that Peter Gigg Awkwardness 42 we might understand awkwardness not only as residing in the void between the universal and concrete, but as the void itself, a 'meta-mood’ or affect-of-affects, so to speak.
This oscillatory structure is thus central to an understanding of comedy and awkwardness, a perpetual motion between two (or more) antagonistic poles to reveal the essential truth of both. Zupančič (via Lacan) uses the metaphor of the möbius strip to explain this tricky concept quite effectively; here we have twisted loop of paper producing the paradoxical effect of having two sides yet only one surface (54-56). The universe and concrete complement each other, in that the missing link between them provides the necessary linkage to form our coherent reality. The other side is always immanent but never graspable, such that the contradiction itself is the effect which it enacts; "the leap, the paradoxical distance between its two sides, is “built into” its very structure” (56 emphasis mine). As such, the ‘gap' has materiality and the universal is concrete.
The möbius strip is as an apt a metaphor for theorising of comedy as it is for the experience of contemporary life, and Larry David finds himself caught in the möbius strip, forever trapped in the infinite movement between the compatible- in-their-incompatibility sides. Zupančič cites the comic moment as a “short circuit,” whereby one ‘jumps’ across the two sides of human experience (via the concurrence of two exclusive realities) or 'accelerates' round to the other side (by pushing a principle to its extreme). This seems a similarly apt means to theorise the awkward as a “joint articulation” integral to our "given reality” (59) - but wherein one necessarily has less agency as to when/where this transferal takes place. In the awkward moment, such as Larry’s confrontation at the ice cream parlour, the awkward subject is in flux between a universal principle (the right to sample ice cream before purchase) and its material incarnation. Larry’s talent, and awkwardness, lies in making the ‘jump’ which discloses the inherent truth of a concept/situation – in this case, that wealthy people take needless advantage of sampling opportunities and are essentially greedy.
To my mind, this bears a certain correlation to Lacan-via- Žižek’s structuring Peter Gigg Awkwardness 43 principle of the ‘Big Other,’ the “the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field” (Fisher 44), more readily understood as the basic recipient of politics and ideology, the consumer of propaganda. Of course, this entity does not exist, and cannot exist, but operates in the negative construction of our selfhood; we like to differentiate ourselves from the gormless masses who lap up everything they are fed, who believe everything they are told. In actuality, it is precisely this distance around the collective fiction of society which allows ideology to operate - indeed, the “discrepancy between [the Big Other] and actual experience is what allows ‘ordinary’ social reality to function” (45). Likewise, it is in the distance between socially enforced principles and their messy realisation which both allows awkwardness to flourish, and is constitutive of awkwardness itself. The tension/distance between societally-accepted norms and social subjects is what constitutes ’society'.
In an attempt to bring together Carroll and Zupančič’s theories of comedy in closing, we might say that the ‘norms’ which produce a humour of incongruity subsist in the realm of the universal. When they manifest in the concrete, they necessarily produce fissures in our own reality principle, “objectifying the contradiction itself” (55). As such, all ‘true’ comedy is inherently political since it establishes “the universal [as] on the side of undermining the universal” (28). The pleasure in Carroll’s model is one of conservatism, a reinforcement of our structuring principles through their controlled transgression, the comedy depending as it does on our awareness of these norms in the first place. The norm is problematised through its manifestation in the realm of the concrete, but the terms of its ‘norm-ness’ remain untouched. While this can be a valid mode of critique, Zupančič would most likely see this as a hallmark of ‘false’ comedy, the neat packaging of the universal alongside our concrete experiences and papering over the fissure so as to propagate our particular reality principle, and ‘domesticate’ any instances of awkwardness. If ‘false’ comedy works to domesticate our ideological contradictions, ‘true’ comedy seizes upon the moment of incongruity as opportunity to expose the contradictory ontology of our everyday experience. This is not so much a consciously-levied attack, as a function integral to its basic structure. Fittingly, in Peter Gigg Awkwardness 44 its structure of belonging-through-not-belonging, the truly comic movement is intrinsically awkward. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 45
Chapter 3 – An Awkward Politics Awkwardness can only exist in relation to its context. As has been established in its relation to both Heideggerian anxiety and theories of comedy, awkwardness depends upon and is constitutive of the subject's perpetual deviation from some presupposed ‘norm'. At this stage, it is important to then examine the means by which these structuring norms are established and effectively naturalised, such that we can understand the mechanisms of contemporary politics as both reflecting to a condition of societal awkwardness and equally producing awkwardness in its subjects. Thus far, this study has skirted around the lived governmental principles which stipulate the awkward, and it is now that we turn, not to confront ourselves, but to confront the social architecture of white, Western, upper-middle-class life in the early 21st century, so brilliantly distilled throughout Curb Your Enthusiasm. Anxiety and comedy are a capable means of critique, but for these means to be truly generative (and for Curb to advance beyond a basic societal complaint), we must isolate their target. What then dictates the principles by which we live, and the normality to which we comport ourselves? The answer, somewhat predictably, is Capital.
Curb’s principal evocation of Capital’s pervasive influence is evident in its depiction of a specific social milieu, that of affluent suburban Los Angeles. David’s focusing on an environment of capitalist success seems initially reductive, at least if it is intended as any degree of social critique. And yet, a skewering of capitalist success is in many ways more critically generative than a depiction of failure, in that it demonstrates the intrinsic dissatisfaction of massive material gain and exemplifies the white upper-middle classes as “the undeserving benefactors of structural social inequalities” (Jhally and Lewis 87). Similarly, Larry and his cohorts’ irreducible awkwardness is a persistent challenge to the inherent normativity of capital. As we shall see, capitalist ‘success’ is contingent upon a degree of capitalist failure (and vice versa), such that “industrial society destablises itself through its very establishment”7 (Beck 14). This is partially the product of Capital’s need to relentlessly expand within a
7 If we take late capitalism and post-industrial society as the inevitable product of mid-capitalist industry. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 46 circumstance of finite resources, but also a result of certain social and political developments specific to our contemporary late capitalism (and thus, the condition of awkwardness). Our innate knowledge of the ‘meaninglessness’ of capitalist success then manifests in an endemic societal anxiety. Since “awkward moments have a way of pitting ourselves against our own history” (Batuman), Curb indirectly implicates its viewers 8 as complicit in these processes of oppression.
This chapter hinges upon my reading of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: is there no Alternative? and its chief assertion that the terms of late capitalism have infiltrated and corrupted all registers of being and experience. The contemporary age, Fisher argues, is defined by “a pervasive sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility” (7); everyone knows that our societal dependence upon capital is intrinsically damaging and non-sustainable, but it has advanced to such a stage that it is physically and psychically impossible to imagine any alternate way of organising society. This means that our very conception of realism (and the derived concepts of the ‘natural’/‘normal’ etc.) is inflected by principles of marketplace logic, such that profit and commodification “seamlessly occupy the horizons of the thinkable” (8). That Capital works to ‘naturally’ direct thought and action is of great importance, since, again, principles (or ‘norms’) which assume the guise of ‘common sense’ “far from making what [they] ‘transmit’ accessible, initially and for the most part conceal it (Heidegger 21) – enacting the “dictatorship in democracy” (Žižek The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology), so to speak.
This becomes (more) problematic when those capitalistic principles are revealed to be untenable and quite contradictory. As has become prevalent in the theory this study has addressed, the process is cyclical. Because, on an existential level, we understand our own being as ‘inauthentic’ (in the moment of anxiety), we construct arbitrary institutions and codes to give the appearance of meaning and consequence. In turn, this produces a situation of greater angst, and exacerbates
8 As an HBO production, we can assume they/we have a degree of disposable income and leisure time… Peter Gigg Awkwardness 47 our dependence on imaginary structures – “if the Real [ie. anxiety] is unbearable, any reality we construct must be a tissue of inconsistencies” (Fisher 55, emphasis mine). As such, this chapter will demonstrate awkwardness as both the necessary product and antagonist of the machinations of late capitalism. Furthermore, if capitalism “both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations,” (35) it bears a remarkable correlation to the structure of Ngai’s ugly feelings, wherein “feelings may be formed and even ’shaped’ by the means used to project, discharge, or ‘expel’ them” (222). This prompts the question – is late capitalism fundamentally awkward?
We can then approach the specific social milieu depicted in Curb as evidencing specific effects and causes of contemporary governance, especially since it so often exposes the “inconsistencies” in our normative being. Curb’s setting and supporting cast primarily depicts a society imbued with capitalist success; the principal characters seemingly have no material concerns, nor any apparent need to do any ‘real’ work. Likewise, their specific context, that of ‘showbiz’ Los Angeles, is one of near-obscene opulence; Larry and his cohorts meander through an endless procession of lavish media offices, golf courses, charity galas and private parties. These are the lucky few for whom capitalism has worked out – through the product of their (tertiary) labour, they are free to enjoy the product(s) of their own success. And yet, no one seems especially satisfied; conversions frequently take a morbid tone, from the discussion of their various “suicide calls”, to a debate as to the ethics of stealing flowers from the roadside memorial of a friend’s mother. Their retreat into material pleasure can be read as a kind of “nihilistic hedonism” (Fisher 1), a panicked response to the dearth of substance and consequence of late capital, and a latent awareness of the profound structural inequalities which have afforded their ‘success’. Moreover, there is truly “no alternative,” since capital tautologically stipulates only the pursuit of further capital. Once material success has been achieved, the ideological super-structure of capital is fundamentally lacking, leaving “an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure” (ibid.)
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 48
These individuals’ basic stasis 9 is the exception which proves the rule of capitalism’s constant (yet directionless) movement; in stimulating (and simulating) a sense of constant expansion and progress, capital remains oddly inert, engendering the “feeling that nothing can change any longer” (Jameson qtd. in Fisher 59). These particular subjects might have attained the “rewards” promised (Crary 40), yet they remain perennially dissatisfied, anxious about their being-in-the-world as such. In their attempt to escape angst through material pursuits, they encounter further anxiety.
What raises Curb’s stance beyond the broad anti-capitalist message of everything from It’s a Wonderful Life to The Lego Movie is that this milieu is avowedly liberal: "they are the elite of the entertainment industry, they are wealthy, they hold all the correct liberal opinions, and therefore their ways are not to be questioned—even on the relatively innocuous level of proposing that another way of doing things might make sense.” (Kotsko 101, emphasis mine). Indeed, their assumed liberalism (and by extension, pseudo socialism) is taken as given, as naturalised as the terms and influence of capital.
I feel that it is important to clarify what is meant by this ‘liberalism,’ given that it too rests on a central tension-contradiction. Beyond an outward insistence on the sanctity of human rights and the ‘freedom of choice,’ “the entire liberal vision relies [upon] the opposition between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by the life-world into which they were born, and those who merely ‘enjoy’ their culture, who are elevated above it, free to choose their culture” (Žižek Tolerance as an Ideological Category, emphasis mine). Much like our initial cursory definitions of the awkward, liberalism assumes a negative comportment to its “totally determined” other, conservatism. Above all, liberalism “likes to imagine itself as post-ideological” (Žižek The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology), championing its own supposed non-determinism as essential to human well- being. There is thus an implicit superiority complex integral to liberalism, the comforting knowledge (or self-delusion) that one is not “ruled” by their culture
9 Admittedly aided by the narrative non-development necessitated by the sitcom format Peter Gigg Awkwardness 49
(as in the actively coercive doctrines of the political right), and ‘free’ to assume the culture, and resultant ‘self’ of their choosing.
This central delusion is evidenced in an especially amusing subplot in season four. Granted one instance of infidelity as a 10th anniversary gift, Larry attempts to conduct an affair with the actor Cady Huffman. Things progress uncharacteristically well, right up to the moment of copulation, wherein Larry notices her dressing-room portrait of George W. Bush – and asks incredulously, “you’re a Republican?” thus terminating the affair instantly. Here, Larry has projected his own Liberalism as the ‘norm,’ and (in much the same logic as that of Capital) refused to acknowledge that there might be any “alternative.” It is as if his Liberalism extends to his very biology, to the most elemental level of his ‘self,’ such that he is physically repulsed by this new knowledge. However, as this incident demonstrates, his liberalism does not manifest as any kind of ‘freedom’ from culture. Instead, it actively restricts his actions – despite his avowed desire for Huffman – such that this is a perfect example of his actions being “totally determined by the life-world into which [he was] born”. It is his identification as a liberal, and the distance he supposedly maintains from conservative ideology, which actually allows more conservative attitudes to creep into his being. It is then this negative comportment to the other, and this contradictory distance which constitutes the essence, that quite firmly aligns liberalism with our established model of awkwardness. What’s more, Alexander Galloway describes ideology as “projection across the ‘gap’ between individuals and their real conditions of existence” (316) – that liberalism subsists in the gap between the subject and conservatism proves it to be an ideology which fails (or refuses) to recognise itself as an ideology. In the same way that David Brent repeatedly fails to recognise himself as a buffoon, despite the relative plethora of evidence, this is quite awkward.
That this takes on a biological quotient (extending to Larry’s inability to maintain an erection in the presence of an amorous republican) demonstrates that his assumed liberalism is just as naturalised as the logic of capitalist realism from which they would outwardly distanciate themselves. Such is the endemic Peter Gigg Awkwardness 50 liberalism of this milieu, that republicans typically only appear as figures of ridicule, and as means to generate awkwardness through the tension between their outward discordance with liberal belief and this milieu’s requirement to appear outwardly genial and inclusive (such is the stated, but reticently practiced, nature of liberalism). In “The Seder” episode, Jeff confesses to Larry that he has inadvertently invited Suzie’s brother in law to their titular celebration. This transgression is compounded by Jeff’s shameful admission that “he’s a conservative […] big time” – as if nothing could be worse. When he is later introduced at the party, he engages Larry in boorish conversation, arguing that the (then-current) Bush presidency represents “historic times” and that “we’re turning the whole damn world around”. Larry’s evident disdain is compounded by a later argument in which he sides with the attending (and, admittedly, very pleasant) sex offender rather than the brother-in-law. The implication is plain; in this society it is preferable to be a convicted sex offender than a Republican. Again, their liberalism then manifests more through this negative comportment, rather than in any particular evocation of ‘freedom’.
Indeed, so sure is this group of their right-on liberal perspectives that they pseudo-subconsciously allow the infiltration of conservative, reactionary, principles. For a bunch of self-avowed liberals, they certainly seem to have a lot of specific ideas as to how people should and should not comport themselves, and demonstrate a willfully blind ascription to the "unwritten rules" of society.
This phenomenon is in some way explained by Wendy Brown's essay American Nightmare, which identifies the nascent intrusion of conservative ideologies into the fabric of Western liberalism. The central thrust of her argument is that contemporary western politics has evidenced a reductive conflation of neoliberalism and neoconservatism: 'the two rationalities work symbiotically to produce a subject relatively indifferent to veracity and accountability among the citizenry" (690). Specifically, the devaluation of state authority implicit to neoliberalism opens the space for neoconservative practices to proliferate, steadily diminishing public institutions in a relative "cannibalism of liberal democracy" (691). This process works both to naturalise the structuring norms Peter Gigg Awkwardness 51 of capitalism, and to displace the properly democratic state as natural. This then is an advanced form of capitalist realism, in that liberalism and conservatism now work in tandem to advance and reinforce society's capitalist super- structure. There is no longer even the binary ‘choice’ between liberalism and conservatism, since they now ultimately serve the same ends. This reinforces the sense of Fisher's "reflexive impotence" and posits that, under the current two- party orientation of western politics, there truly is "no alternative”. This further clarifies awkwardness as political effect, since it again depends upon the oscillatory movement between two apparently incompatible (ideological/political) points to arrive at the true empty impetus of capitalism.
What remains then, specifically in Curb’s distinctive milieu, is the performance of liberalism, a political stance adopted more in the name of keeping up appearances rather than reflecting any core ‘belief’. Or rather, this is spectacular liberalism, worryingly compatible with the terms of Guy Debord’s damning manifesto The Society of the Spectacle. Debord conceived of the contemporary world as one in which “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation […] it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (1). Accordingly, Larry and his friend’s liberalism is most often conveyed in spectacular, public, gestures, from Rob Reiner’s auctioning of celebrity dinner- dates to Cheryl’s extravagant NRDC fundraisers. As Larry explains rather succinctly when finalising the division of his estate following his divorce from Cheryl, “I want to look like a good guy […] but I don’t want to really be a good guy here.” It is the appearance of liberalism, and stated self-identification with, which takes precedence over any alignment with one’s authentic belief. This is a kind of internalisation (ironically through overt externalisations) of what Robert Pfaller terms “interpassivity,” the phenomena by which we allow our favoured cultural objects (or empty material gestures) to enact our politics for us (Fisher 12). We can watch It’s a Wonderful Life and leave the cinema convinced that capitalism is evil, yet we will not enact any quantifiable change in our behaviours, since we have allowed the film to ‘perform’ our Marxism for us. The same process is implicit in these spectacular gestures throughout Curb; as long as we maintain the aggressively outward appearance of liberal politics, then we supposedly ‘are’ Peter Gigg Awkwardness 52 liberal by default, “allowing us to continue to consume with impunity” (14). Again, it is the imagined distance from one’s own subject position that the conservative ideology flourishes. As Žižek explains, “even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 33).
To relate this back to awkwardness, we can return to Zupančič’s explication of the comic movement, which has been co-opted in its application to the awkward. Therein, Zupančič identifies “the ego-ideal itself” as the real comic object, that is, how we naively construct our own self-identity and believe ourselves to be perceived by others (32). Giving the example of a comically self-important baron, whose pomposity remains undeterred by various material intrusions (slipping on a banana peel, falling into a muddy puddle etc.) she argues: the capital human weakness here—what is most human, concrete, and realistic—is precisely the baron’s unshakeable belief in himself and his own importance: that is to say, his presumptuousness? This is the feature that makes him “human,” not the fact that he falls into a muddy puddle or slips on a banana peel […] A true comedy about a presumptuous baron has to produce the following formula in all its materiality: an aristocrat who believes that he is really and intrinsically an aristocrat is, in this very belief, a common silly human. In other words: a true comedy about aristocracy has to play its cards in such a way that the very universal aspect of this concept produces its own humanity, corporeality, subjectivity […] This “baronness” is the real comic object, produced by comedy as the quintessence of the universal itself. (29-31.)
Replace “baron”/“aristocrat” with “liberal,” and we can see Curb as producing its own “humanity, corporeality, subjectivity” (ie. awkwardness) precisely through the presumed universality of its characters’ liberalism. Zupančič cites Jacques Lacan’s remark that “a lunatic is not some poor chap who believes that he is a king; a lunatic is a king who believes that he really is a king” (32). In the hermetic spheres of late capitalism, we can then take this further to suggest that “a lunatic is a liberal who believes that he really is a liberal”. Thus to (self-, and collectively) Peter Gigg Awkwardness 53 identify as liberal within a contemporary western milieu is innately awkward, in terms of this structure. The “very universal aspect” of this liberalism (that it is so naturally assumed by this entire social sect) produces a more specifically conservative “subjectivity,” and it is in this specific distance between the liberal ego-ideal and the concrete subject (acting in accordance with the terms of late capitalism) that the awkward subject is produced. In Curb’s embodiment of contemporary liberalism, we repeatedly see this “short circuit between some universal (and acceptable) notion or belief and its obscene other side” (ibid.) – we can take this “obscene other side” as the neoconservatism intrinsic to Brown’s American Nightmare.
This basic corruption on the level of our ideological-political ego-ideal, informs what Brown identifies as the production of the “undemocratic citizen,” who is conditioned to “expect neither truth nor accountability in governance and state actions” (Brown 692). With traditional state architecture still in place, the subject necessarily looks for accountability and a pseudo-objective ‘truth’ elsewhere. Perhaps this explains the insistence and dependence on societal norms as evident throughout Curb, its characters striving towards some ‘universal’ structuring principle to atone for their baseless lives. Yet, as has been well established, these norms tragically produce the anxiety from which they flee, reinforcing the means by which capital “both feeds on and reproduces the moods of its populations” (Fisher 35). At this late stage, when “beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration” (4), the subject clings in desperation to the “constellation of norms,” which they are told constitutes society, as the last remnant of their selfhood.
To briefly historicise via Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Culture Industry, we can trace the formation and dependence upon these social ‘norms’ back to the Enlightenment, which re-fashioned thinking itself into “the creation of unified, scientific order,” and necessitated “the derivation of factual knowledge from principles […] elucidated as arbitrarily postulated axioms, innate ideas or higher abstractions (82, emphasis mine). In this manner, “the understanding impresses the intelligibility of the matter on it as an objective quality” (ibid, emphasis mine), Peter Gigg Awkwardness 54 such that human conduct and interaction might be ratified, ascribing to an apparently “objective” binary of right and wrong. Curb depicts the postmodern extension and acceleration of this logic, a milieu fostered and now entirely dependent on these axioms. Fittingly, “enthusiasm is bad. Calmness and decisiveness constitute the strength of virtue (96, emphasis mine). Although the Curb Your Enthusiasm title is most often taken as a self-deprecating nod to its existence in the wake of Seinfeld, it is equally applicable as a mantra for the contemporary age. Reason (arbitrary or not) is simply incompatible with human enthusiasm. And, as Curb so frequently demonstrates, humans are not reasonable creatures.
Reason would “equate the truth with scientific systemisation”, even though “the notion of the self-understanding of science contradicts the notion of science itself” (85). Once again, “the tradition that […] becomes dominant, far from making what it ‘transmits’ accessible, initially and for the most part conceals it” (Heidegger 21). The championing of systemised reason as the foundational structure of experience fundamentally “blocks access to the primordial ‘sources’ from which the traditional categories and concepts were […] drawn” (ibid), papering over our elemental awkwardness and spurring a dependence on anxiety-producing reason.
Accordingly, the insistence on quasi-sacred "unwritten rules" underpinning human conduct is indicative of the dearth of substance inherent to a world where "everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation" (Debord 1). With nothing to be "directly lived" we arrive at a position whereby "the schema of an activity was more important than its content" (Adorno and Horkheimer 88). In Marx's terms, this is the process intrinsic to the operations of capitalism by which "the commodity form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this”. (Marx 165). We can see in Curb a model of spectacular society wherein the "commodity form" of social interaction "have absolutely no connection" with the authentic desire or intent beneath. More often than not, the manner or form of Peter Gigg Awkwardness 55 interaction takes precedence over the actual message conveyed.
There is a plotline in season six where Larry generously donates a new wing to a local museum, with a requisite plaque citing his gift. His momentary self- satisfaction is curtailed when he learns of an adjacent wing, with a plaque that reads “Donated By Anonymous,” which turns out to be Larry’s friend and sometime rival, actor Ted Danson. The two donations are functionally identical - and relatively inconsequential for such wealthy subjects - but it is the means that is contested, especially when Danson smugly admits, “I’m anonymous”. The quality of anonymity is fetishised entirely, since it has “absolutely no connection with the physical nature” of the donation, and at Danson’s admittance, isn’t anonymous at all. Truly, the “schema” of the donation is more important that the relative “content” as Senator Barbara Boxer congratulates Danson and snubs Larry who fumes, “next time I give money, it’ll be anonymous and I’ll tell everybody!” These examples are so abundant in Curb because the fundamental contradictions and corruptions of enlightenment (and therefore capitalist) thought, exacerbated as they are by the spectacle, have depleted all social "pleasure", leaving only the empty façade of societal "schema". We are reminded that, in Foucauldian terms, the exercise of power is the “conduct of conducts” (341), and as such this milieu’s ‘policing’ of their own norms (“I think you’re crossing a line, Larry…” warns Cheryl) betrays an internalised governmentality.
We then see in this milieu the active process whereby capital "was both the actual form of reason and the power which destroyed reason" (Adorno and Horkheimer 90), since it propagates the ‘anti-reason’ of awkwardness. Consequently, "however encouraging and hopeful the American dream may be, it sustains a right-wing political agenda" (Jhally and Lewis 74). In Curb's roundabout way, it articulates Adorno and Horkheimer's cynical attestation that "a fortunate life in a world of cruelty is shown to be the vicious contradiction it really is in light of the mere existence of that world" (118) – it is not enough to live one’s liberalism vicariously.
This is none the more apparent than in Curb’s (deliberate) problematisation of Peter Gigg Awkwardness 56 race. Nothing more typifies the experience of white (upper-) middle-class superiority than the belief, (or indeed, lived experience) that “racism is no longer a problem in the United States” (Jhally and Lewis 71). This is brought to bear upon Larry when his wife insistently fosters the Blacks, a black family (“You’re last name is Black? That’s like if my last name was Jew- like, Larry Jew”) made homeless by “Hurricane Edna”. For this white, affluent society (and by implication, the audience), “the image of a racially divided world is burdensome [read: awkward] because it implicates white people as the undeserving benefactors of structural social inequalities” (87). It foregrounds what the middle-class experience pushes into the periphery – that our wealth comes at others’ expense, and that our dominant ideology is merely a means of “legitimating suffering” (Žižek Brainwash Masters). If conventional television, and spectacular entertainment in general, works to convince its audience that, “regardless of their circumstances, the system is fundamentally fair” (Jhally and Lewis 74), Curb performs the opposite. As opposed to telling its viewers that “you are included in this world, […] because you deserve to be” (78), Curb is an uncomfortable reminder that we don’t deserve our privileged lives. Our good fortune is precisely that, a happy accident in a world which is profoundly unjust.
As the Blacks develop into members of Curb’s main cast, their presence serves to demonstrate the specifically racial quotient to awkwardness, as preserve of the white middle-class. Leon in particular comes to represent something of an anti- awkwardness, his boundless self-confidence providing a comedic contrast to Larry’s nebbishness. Unlike Larry and his ilk, Leon rarely debates as to the ‘correct’ course of action or social more to adopt, and Larry comes to rely on him as source of advice and instigator of decisive action when his own schemas fail him. When Larry deliberates as to how to respond to a series of anti-Semitic insults he received in his doctor’s waiting room, Leon instantly proffers, “Next time a man call you a fucking faggot, you get in that ass, Larry.” The terms of awkwardness simply do not pose any barrier to Leon, and his race is a viable means to bypass them entirely. We see then that, not only is awkwardness a reminder of the structured social inequalities we (as middle class liberal subjects) depend upon, but that it is a lived effect of those selfsame inequalities. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 57
If capitalism “both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations,” I would argue that it reproduces the moods of specific populations. What greater proof is there of awkwardness’ socio-political basis, than its non-applicability to other socio-political groups?
To approach a conclusion, if can we consider anxiety as the foundational human ‘mood,’ and capitalism the societal super-structure imposed to suppress anxiety, then awkwardness is perhaps the möbius-strip conflation of both. Ernst Bloch describes “expectation emotions” as “aim[ing] less at some specific object as the fetish of their desire than at the configuration of the world in general, or at the future disposition of the self” (qtd. in Ngai 74-75). Given that capitalism effectively sets the parameters of our experience and ‘configures’ our understanding of the world, as well as constricting the "future dispositions of the self", is it not productive to think of capitalism in terms of a ‘mood’ or ugly emotion in and of itself? That is to say that capitalism generates and enforces a situation of “suspended agency” (1) – the defining quality of Ngai’s unpleasant feelings – in its empty postulating of individual consumer ‘choice’. Ngai further clarifies that “sentiments of disenchantment […] are now perversely integrated […] into capitalist production itself” (4). If capitalism is inherently awkward, subsisting as it does in the movement-distance between its universal and concrete manifestations, it becomes exponentially harder to distinguish ‘Capital’ as universal from the ‘disenchanted’ concrete. We are reminded that we generate further ugly feelings through our essential angst as to our ugly feelings (10), mirroring the self-deluding, objectiveless, expansion essential to capitalist success.
Awkwardness is then a specific response to a specific social and political situation. Its relation to capitalism is fundamentally tautological, since capital feeds on a societal awkwardness, produced as they are by the terms of capitalism. Here we return to Mark Fisher, who in paraphrasing Baruch Spinoza asserts that “freedom […] is something that can be achieved only when we can apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the ‘sad passions’ that intoxicate and entrance us” (73). Ironically, is only through this Peter Gigg Awkwardness 58 perspective of ontological-epistemological oppression and societal self-deceit that we might consider awkwardness in terms of what it positively provides. It allows Curb’s protestations against the terms of the ‘normal’ to be read as anti- capitalist critique, speaking as it does of a different, more fundamental, realm of experience lurking beneath the architecture of capital.
To reverse the principal tautology, awkwardness allows us to apprehend these ‘real causes’ as rooted in capitalist realism and its subsequent corruption of liberalism. Awkwardness, in its very existence, speaks of this freedom by proving the conceit of our “sad passions.” In its persistent critique of the terms of the everyday, awkwardness suggests a means of existential emancipation from the all-consuming terms of contemporary capitalism – but only once we as liberals have awkwardly confronted our innate complicity in our own oppression.
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 59
Some Awkward Conclusions If the impetus for this study was the maddening tautology inherent to defining awkwardness, we have arrived at a point wherein awkwardness’ internal structures are also inescapably awkward. This is produced in part through the recurring logic of cyclicity – the cause is simultaneously the effect. Or rather, awkwardness causes awkwardness, the essence of which is to be found in its perpetual movement between cause and effect. This determines the difficulty of awkwardness’ definition; it is intrinsically difficult to grasp a concept in its totality if it is necessarily in constant motion, or if it subsists in and through the motion between two or more positions. Moreover, it is hard to categorise that which problematises the very concept of fixed categories.
As such, I have depended upon Raymond William’s assurances that it is not necessary (and can often be quite reductive) to seize contemporary phenomena in their concrete entirety. If a social process is still in formation and nascent development, it cannot be confined to, or as, a singular entity. Any attempt to do so will then inevitably produce tautology.
Perhaps this approach may limit my research’s future applicability and relevance, but in exchange it establishes its contemporary vitality – this awkwardness is specific to and contingent upon the workings of late capital, within which I unfortunately find myself. I’m not sure whether having Larry David as experiential companion offers any lasting solace, but at least Curb Your Enthusiasm serves to ‘lock’ this theory in/to its specific context, something of a cultural artefact of the present moment.
Are we then to conceive of Larry David as something of an Adornian “dark chronicler,” mercilessly disclosing the “shocking truths” (118) of our contemporary milieu? His perennial dissatisfaction certainly supports this role to an extent, but I think it is altogether more productive (and testament to his formidable artistry) to read his work, and evocation of the awkward, as critiquing the structuring logics and assumptions of late western society.
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 60
Principally, the very existence of awkwardness (not to mention its endemic spread and the active pursuit of which we encounter in popular entertainment) problematises our reliance on binary categories of right and wrong. As Curb reliably demonstrates, awkwardness speaks of normativity and its discontents – neither a total ascription to society’s whims, nor a resolute disavowal. Awkwardness exists in, and more fundamentally is, that ‘nowhere space’ which our rationalist ontologies both work to suppress and perpetually produce. Awkwardness may be born in and from a condition of existential anxiety, but it repudiates Heidegger’s redemptive but limiting conception of authenticity. There is a realm of experience in between and beyond the inauthentic and authentic, which reflexively demonstrates the inadequacy of either category.
This confirms William’s basic argument; we can show that feelings are not a ‘natural’ facet of human experience, but rather socially and societally produced conditions of experience, with their own identifiable structures. Herein, we encounter again our recurring motif of movement – in attempting to escape anxiety, the subject turns away from its source, only to encounter further sources of anxiety in and through the motion of the turn. As such, they can never properly attain authenticity, nor regress back into comfortable inauthenticity. The question remains whether it is the categories of inauthentic/authentic that are lacking, or that our late capitalism has produced a situation in which they are now simply non-applicable. Our desperate clinging to the category of the authentic, of some ‘true’ means of comporting oneself to society, speaks both of the dearth of substance inherent to that society and the ironical inauthenticity of this authentic. The pursuit of authenticity as a fixed position/destination reduces it into a societal ‘norm’ itself – the like of which the anxious subject initially ‘turns away’ from.
We see indeed a pattern emerging in which categories of negative comportment (inauthenticity to authenticity, liberalism to conservatism etc.) cannot extricate themselves from their essential dialectic with their other. As these processes repeat, exacerbated by the cyclical stasis of late capital, the gap between the two positions tightens, until they become so symbiotic as to be indistinguishable. The Peter Gigg Awkwardness 61 awkward subject is perennially caught in this gap: a perpetual oscillation, somehow assuming the guise of stillness in its constant, directionless, objectiveless movement.
If statements such as these might seem hopelessly nihilistic, they needn’t do. Such hopelessness is merely the product of our reliance (and turning to in time of need) on empty, facile, structures that negate the potentials of our very humanity. Fittingly for a study which initially questioned the compatibility of awkwardness with comedy, it is Zupančič’s model of the comic movement proper, which betrays the emancipatory potentials of this ‘situation’. Whereas ‘false’ conventional comedy merely works to domesticate moments of ideological discrepancy, true comedy is innately political in its synthesis of the universal and concrete, each working to undermine the other so as to dissolve our seemingly ‘natural’ categories of experience. What remains – once the oppositional poles of the universal and concrete have been demonstrably eradicated – is the distance between and beyond them. Or, more succinctly, what remains is awkwardness.
In drawing things to an awkward conclusion, I think we can begin to think of awkwardness as something approaching a model of philosophy – a means of explaining life and human behaviour, and as a means of productively guiding it. In its essential structures and instigation of societal scepticism, awkwardness bears a remarkable correlation with the logic of perfectionism, the branch of ethics developed by the American philosopher Stanley Cavell through the teachings of Ralph Emerson. While Larry David is by no means a ‘perfect individual’ (and I somehow find it hard to envisage Emerson murdering a swan with a golf club), his irreducible awkwardness correlates with the perfectionist’s necessary awareness and confrontation of their own “false position” (Cavell Cities of Words 23). Indeed, writing in the New Yorker, Elif Batuman echoes this in stating, “awkwardness is the consciousness of a false position” – an innate knowledge of the inequality which has afforded one’s socio-economic privilege. At its most existential level, awkwardness is an awareness of injustice, the notion that things aren’t ‘right,’ that normative experience is categorically unfair, even by its own standards. As such, Curb resembles – in its most cringe-inducing Peter Gigg Awkwardness 62 moments – the necessary “painful conversation” (Cavell ibid. 336), which sets the subject on their path of upward ascension. Fittingly, this journey has no concrete destination, but should be considered "a zigzag of discontinuous steps [with] no unique point of arrival but only a willingness for change" (Cavell Cavell on Film 337). For the sake of space and clarity of argument, my study has given little attention to Curb’s formal elements, but it strikes me that the sitcom structure, with its perpetual deferral of real solution (it must necessarily maintain the conceptual ‘situation’), has the potential to be read as a perfectionist format, an endless ‘journey,’ with Larry frequently exhibiting a “willingness for change” in his essential dissatisfaction. The various integrations of later developments in David’s ‘real’ life (chiefly his divorce) serve to perpetually disequilibrate the established format, pushing its capacity to speak of something outside and beyond itself, a realm of truth crossing variously conflating media and evocations of the ‘self’. This existential truth (reminiscent of Heidegger’s “primordial sources” masked by our inauthentic normality), proffers something of an infinite perfectibility, a perpetual willingness for change demonstrated through the show’s very changeability.
Likewise, the ‘perfection’ integral to perfectionism is not a fixed conception of the self, nor is it a realistically achievable objective/destination. Rather, it requires a notion of the “unattained but attainable self” (Emerson, qtd. in Cavell on Film, 337), towards which the perfectionist continually strives. Since the perfectionist’s journey stipulates “no unique point of arrival,” the essential ‘perfection’ once again subsists in the distance between one’s false position and the unattained self. It is a concerted movement away from one’s own falsity, but a movement which necessarily never comes to rest – it is the continuous movement of the perfectionist journey which is truly generative, through its rejection of fixed categories or positions. Emerson describes this process as a “journey towards the good […] a path of education […] an exercise in coming to oneself” (ibid). While this has the echoes of Heideggerian authenticity, I think the distinction is in “coming to oneself,” rather than “turning to confront oneself”. Heidegger’s mistake (other than his dubious political allegiances….) is in conceiving the authentic self as some fixed entity, or finite point of arrival, that Peter Gigg Awkwardness 63 we can merely ‘turn’ to and disclose amid its context of inauthenticity. What awkwardness demonstrates is that there is no essential ‘self’ as consistent beneath the myriad of material distractions and arbitrary norms which constitute contemporary society. Instead, “coming to oneself” is an admission and acceptance of one’s fragmentary and discordant being through a fragmentary and discordant journey.
Our initial definitions considered awkwardness purely in terms of its deviance, as something to be rectified, suppressed or – even worse – ignored. What a true understanding of the nature of awkwardness affords is the knowledge that any category of ‘normality’ is inherently and ironically awkward to begin with. In embracing the awkward, through its active pursuit in cultural objects such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, we can find our own emancipation in our own essential ‘being’ – in demonstrating the inadequacy of our socio-political structures, it simultaneously discloses the adequacy of that which they work to suppress, our innate flexible, changeable, human awkwardness.
As Žižek explains, “we […] enjoy our ideology. To step out of our ideology … it hurts” (The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology). The pseudo-pain of awkwardness is precisely this existential ‘step,’ an admittance that our terms of experience and selfhood are lacking. Larry may lament that “I want to look like a good guy,” but we first need to stop pretending to be ‘good guys’ altogether. To take the first stride towards perfectionism is to admit that we can do better, that we can be better. The revolution need not be a radical one, “not [an] access to another world necessarily, but a break in the assumptions of this one” (Cavell 344).
Peter Gigg Awkwardness 64
Thank you to everyone who offered insight and showed enthusiasm – making this thesis so rewarding (nay, enjoyable) to write. Special thanks to Abe Geil, whose advice and support was invaluable throughout.
Bibliography Aarons, Debra, and Marc Mierowsky. ‘Obscenity, Dirtiness and Licence in Jewish Comedy.’ Comedy Studies 5.2 (2014): 165–177. Adorno, Thedor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso Books, 1989. Batuman, Elif. ‘The Awkward Age - The New Yorker.’ The New Yorker, 9 Sept. 2014. Web. 20 June 2015. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage Publications, 1992. Billig, Michael. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage, 2012. Braver, Lee. Heidegger: Thinking of Being. Hoboken: Wiley, 2014. Brook, Vincent. You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. Rutgers University Press, 2006. Brown, Wendy. ‘American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De- Democratization.’ Political Theory 34.6 (2006): 690–714. Web. Carroll, Noel. Humour: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cavell, Stanley. Cavell on Film. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Cavell, Stanley. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Belknap Press, 2005. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2014. Critchley, Simon. ‘Being and Time, Part 5: Anxiety.’ The Guardian 6 July 2009. Web. 20 June 2015. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press, 2004. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 65
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Foucault, Michel. The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: London: Penguin, 2002, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961. Galloway, A. R. ‘Language Wants To Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology.’ Journal of Visual Culture 5.3 (2006): 315–331. Web. Gorner, Paul. Heidegger’s Being and Time: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gunn, Joshua. ‘Mourning Speech: Haunting and the Spectral Voices of Nine- Eleven.’ Text and Performance Quarterly 24.2 (2004): 91–114. Web. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. India: Motilal Banarsidass,India, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Jhally, Sut, and Justin Lewis. Enlightened Racism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Jones, Campbell. ‘The Subject Supposed to Recycle.’ Philosophy Today54.1 (2010): 30–39. Web. Kotsko, Adam. Awkwardness. Winchester: Zero Books, 2010. Magrini, James. ‘“Anxiety” in Heidegger’s Being and Time: The Harbinger of Authenticity’. Philosophy Scholarship (2006): 77–86. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Merriam-Webster. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster,U.S., 2005. Middleton, Jason. Documentary’s Awkward Turn. New York: Routledge, 2014. Mills, Brett. Television Sitcom. London: British Film Institute, 2005. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy (Short Circuits). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. Peter Gigg Awkwardness 66
Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Brainwash Masters.’ Lecture given at Westerkerk in Amsterdam, 28th May 2015. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso Books, 2010. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso Books, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Tolerance as an Ideological Category.’ Critical Inquiry2008: 660–
682. Web.
Film and Television American Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros. 2014. Curb Your Enthusiasm. HBO. 1999-Present. The Imitation Game. Dir. Morten Tyldum. StudioCanal. 2014. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. RKO. 1946. The Lego Movie. Dirs. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Warner Bros. 2014. The Office. BBC. 2001-2013. Parks and Recreation. NBC. 2009-2015. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology Dir. Sophie Fiennes. Zeitgeist Films. 2012. Seinfeld. NBC. 1989-1998. Selma. Dir. Ava DuVernay. Paramount. 2014. The Theory of Everything. Dir. James Marsh. Focus Features. 2014. True Detective. HBO. 2014-Present.