The origins of hipsterism
In 1998, the internet was new, and talk shows were the precursor of reality television. This "transcript" of one such show was posted on a listserv that year. The satirical elements---the judgmental captions imposed over the guest's images, coupled with the hosts' postmodern willingness to assume that each of their guest's [bizarre] values were as good as another's---were a dead-on critique of every major player in the talk show genre, while also poking fun at those deadly ironic college students who watched---or "studied"---talk shows in between reading the texts being named-dropped. I hadn't read any of them, and I don't think anyone has ever read them all, but I knew enough to laugh. My friend Sasha was the real target audience, and I admired Sasha, who sent them to me. I forwarded them to my similarly smart and funny friends by email, then lovingly formatted the joke in HTML using Notepad, and uploaded it to my GeoCities website. I've had the HTML for the old site on every hard drive I've owned, since. Someday soon it will go into a cloud, when I give up on hard drives altogether.
You can find both of these parodies online, if you know what you're looking for, but you're unlikely to stumble upon them, and you definitely won't find them by searching Google for "the origins of hipsterism." (Well, now you might.) This fact tends to suggest that the internet has chronological strata, and that there are all kinds of old jokes down there, waiting for someone to rediscover and study.
I went searching for---and found---the original March 1998 posting. Saving an old joke from GeoCities and reposting it on Facebook (and then again on LiveJournal?) is a little like preserving a record by making a YouTube video of your turntable. And caring about this enough to hunt it down and corroborate a creaking in-joke is, by Noah Brand's definition, hipster.
The URL mentioned below in the Jerry Springer sketch below doesn't work today (5/12/12). The best I can offer is this site which, though it points to what it says is the original posting and the author's website, are cobwebs (as of today, anyway).
Jenny Jones: Postmodernism Ruined My Life
The following is from the Buffalo POETICS list:
By MARK LEYNER, HOBOKEN, N.J.
JENNY JONES: Boy, we have a show for you today!
Recently, the University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty made the stunning declaration that nobody has “the foggiest idea” what postmodernism means. “It would be nice to get rid of it,” he said.
“It isn’t exactly an idea; it’s a word that pretends to stand for
an idea.”
This shocking admission that there is no such thing as postmodernism has produced a firestorm of protest around the country. Thousands of authors, critics and graduate students who’d considered themselves postmodernists are outraged at the betrayal.
Today we have with us a writer- a recovering postmodernist- who
believes that his literary career and personal life have been irreparably damaged by the theory, and who feels defrauded by the academics who promulgated it. He wishes to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him “Alex.”
Alex, as an adolescent, before you began experimenting with postmodernism, you considered yourself- what?
Close shot of ALEX.
An electronic blob obscures his face. Words appear at bottom of screen: “Says he was traumatized by postmodernism and blames academics.”
ALEX (his voice electronically altered): A high modernist. Y’know, Pound, Eliot, Georges Braque, Wallace Stevens, Arnold Schoenberg, Mies van der Rohe. I had all of Schoenberg’s 78s.
JENNY JONES: And then you started reading people like Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard- how did that change your feelings about your modernist heroes?
ALEX: I suddenly felt that they were, like, stifling and canonical.
JENNY JONES: Stifling and canonical? That is so sad, such a waste. How old were you when you first read Fredric Jameson?
ALEX: Nine, I think.
The AUDIENCE gasps.
JENNY JONES: We have some pictures of young Alex….
We see snapshots of 14-year-old ALEX reading Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” The AUDIENCE oohs and ahs.
ALEX: We used to go to a friend’s house after school- y’know, his
parents were never home- and we’d read, like, Paul Virilio and Julia Kristeva.
JENNY JONES: So you’re only 14, and you’re already skeptical toward
the “grand narratives” of modernity, you’re questioning any belief
system that claims universality or transcendence. Why?
ALEX: I guess- to be cool.
JENNY JONES: So, peer pressure?
ALEX: I guess.
JENNY JONES: And do you remember how you felt the very first time you entertained the notion that you and your universe are constituted by language- that reality is a cultural construct, a “text” whose meaning is determined by infinite associations with other “texts”?
ALEX: Uh, it felt, like, good. I wanted to do it again.
The AUDIENCE groans.
JENNY JONES: You were arrested at about this time?
ALEX: For spray-painting “The Hermeneutics of Indeterminacy” on an
overpass.
JENNY JONES: You’re the child of a mixed marriage- is that right?
ALEX: My father was a de Stijl Wittgensteinian and my mom was a neo-pre-Raphaelite.
JENNY JONES: Do you think that growing up in a mixed marriage made you more vulnerable to the siren song of postmodernism?
ALEX: Absolutely. It’s hard when you’re a little kid not to be able to just come right out and say (sniffles), y’know, I’m an Imagist or I’m a phenomenologist or I’m a post-painterly abstractionist. It’s really hard- especially around the holidays. (He cries.)
JENNY JONES: I hear you. Was your wife a postmodernist?
ALEX: Yes. She was raised avant-pop, which is a fundamentalist offshoot of postmodernism.
JENNY JONES: How did she react to Rorty’s admission that postmodernism was essentially a hoax?
ALEX: She was devastated. I mean, she’s got all the John Zorn albums and the entire Semiotext(e) series. She was crushed.
We see ALEX’S WIFE in the audience, weeping softly, her hands covering her face.
JENNY JONES: And you were raising your daughter as a postmodernist?
ALEX: Of course. That’s what makes this particularly tragic. I mean, how do you explain to a 5-year-old that self-consciously recycling cultural detritus is suddenly no longer a valid art form when, for her entire life, she’s been taught that it is?
JENNY JONES: Tell us how you think postmodernism affected your career as a novelist.
ALEX: I disavowed writing that contained real ideas or any real passion. My work became disjunctive, facetious and nihilistic. It was all blank parody, irony enveloped in more irony.
It merely recapitulated the pernicious banality of television and advertising. I found myself indiscriminately incorporating any and all kinds of pop kitsch and shlock. (He begins to weep again.)
JENNY JONES: And this spilled over into your personal life?
ALEX: It was impossible for me to experience life with any emotional intensity. I couldn’t control the irony anymore. I perceived my own feelings as if they were in quotes.
I italicized everything and everyone. It became impossible for me to appraise the quality of anything. To me everything was equivalent- the Brandenburg Concertos and the Lysol jingle had the same value…. (He breaks down, sobbing.)
JENNY JONES: Now, you’re involved in a lawsuit, aren’t you?
ALEX: Yes. I’m suing the Modern Language Association.
JENNY JONES: How confident are you about winning?
ALEX: We need to prove that, while they were actively propounding it, academics knew all along that postmodernism was a specious theory.
If we can unearth some intradepartmental memos- y’know, a paper trail- any corroboration that they knew postmodernism was worthless cant at the same time they were teaching it, then I think we have an excellent shot at establishing liability.
JENNY JONES wades into audience and proffers microphone to a woman.
WOMAN (with lateral head-bobbing): It’s ironic that Barry Scheck is representing the M.L.A. in this litigation because Scheck is the postmodern attorney par excellence. This is the guy who’s made a career of volatilizing truth in the simulacrum of exculpation!
VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: You go, girl!
WOMAN: Scheck is the guy who came up with the quintessentially postmodern re-bleed defense for O. J., which claims that O.J. merely vigorously shook Ron and Nicole, thereby re-aggravating pre-existing knife wounds. I’d just like to say to any client of
Barry Scheck- lose that zero and get a hero!
The AUDIENCE cheers wildly.
WOMAN: Uh, I forgot my question.
Dissolve to message on screen: If you believe that mathematician Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem has caused you or a member of your family to dress too provocatively, call (800) 555-9455.
Dissolve back to studio. In the audience, JENNY JONES extends the microphone to a man in his mid-30s with a scruffy beard and a bandana around his head.
MAN WITH BANDANA: I’d like to say that this “Alex” is the single worst example of pointless irony in American literature, and this whole heartfelt renunciation of postmodernism is a ploy- it’s just more irony.
The AUDIENCE whistles and hoots.
ALEX: You think this is a ploy?! (He tears futilely at the electronic blob.) This is my face!
The AUDIENCE recoils in horror.
ALEX: This is what can happen to people who naively embrace postmodernism, to people who believe that the individual- the autonomous, individualist subject- is dead. They become a palimpsest of media pastiche- a mask of metastatic irony.
JENNY JONES (biting lip and shaking her head): That is so sad. Alex- final words?
ALEX: I’d just like to say that self-consciousness and irony seem like fun at first, but they can destroy your life. I know. You gotta be earnest, be real. Real feelings are important. Objective reality does exist.
AUDIENCE members whoop, stomp and pump fists in the air.
JENNY JONES: I’d like to thank Alex for having the courage to come on today and share his experience with us.
Join us for tomorrow’s show, “The End of Manichean, Bipolar Geopolitics Turned My Boyfriend Into an Insatiable Sex Freak (and I Love It!)”
I have a philosophical secret!
The Lowest-Rated Jerry Springer Show Ever
By Sean Hartigan (www.madhouse.org/ulro)
CROWD: Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!
JERRY: Today’s guests are here because they can’t agree on fundamental philosophical principles. I’d like to welcome Todd to the show.
Todd enters from backstage.
JERRY: Hello, Todd.
TODD: Hi, Jerry.
JERRY: (reading from card) So, Todd, you’re here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?
TODD: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for three years now. We did everything together. We were really inseparable. But then she discovered post-Marxist political and literary theory, and it’s been nothing but fighting ever since.
JERRY: Why is that?
TODD: You see, Jerry, I’m a traditional Cartesian rationalist. I believe that the individual self, the “I” or ego is the foundation of all metaphysics. She, on the other hand, believes that the contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist consumerist discourse.
CROWD: Ooooohhhh!
TODD: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?
JERRY: So what do you want to tell her today?
TODD: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism, we’re through. I just can’t go on having a relationship with a woman who doesn’t believe I exist.
JERRY: Well, you’re going to get your chance. Here’s Ursula!
Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.
URSULA: Patriarchal colonizer!
She slaps him viciously. Todd leaps up, but the security guys pull them apart before things can go any further.
URSULA: Don’t listen to him! Logic is a male hysteria! Rationality equals oppression and the silencing of marginalized voices!
TODD: The classical methodology of rational dialectic is our only road to truth! Don’t try to deny it!
URSULA: You and your dialectic! That’s how it’s been through our whole relationship, Jerry. Mindless repetition of the post-Enlightenment meta-narrative. “You have to start with radical doubt, Ursula.” “Post-structuralism is just classical sceptical thought re-cast in the language of semiotics, Ursula.”
CROWD: Booo! Booo!
JERRY: Well, Ursula, come on. Don’t you agree that the roots of contemporary neo-Leftism simply have to be sought in Enlightenment political philosophy?
URSULA: History is the discourse of powerful centrally located voices marginalizing and de-scribing the sub-altern!
TODD: See what I have to put up with? Do you know what it’s like living with someone who sees sex as a metaphoric demonstration of the anti-feminist violence implicit in the discourse of the dominant power structure? It’s terrible. She just lies there and thinks of Andrea Dworkin. That’s why we never do it any more.
CROWD: Wooooo!
URSULA: You liar! Why don’t you tell them how you haven’t been able to get it up for the past three months because you couldn’t decide if your penis truly had essential Being, or was simply a manifestation of Mind?
TODD: Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
URSULA: It’s true!
JERRY: Well, I don’t think we’re going to solve this one right away. Our next guests are Louis and Tina. And Tina has a little confession to make!
Louis and Tina come onstage. Todd and Ursula continue bickering in the background.
JERRY: Tina, you are… (reads cards)… an existentialist, is that right?
TINA: That’s right, Jerry. And Louis is, too.
JERRY: And what did you want to tell Louis today?
TINA: Jerry, today I want to tell him…
JERRY: Talk to Louis. Talk to him.
Crowd hushes.
TINA: Louis… I’ve loved you for a long time….
LOUIS: I love you, too, Tina.
TINA: Louis, you know I agree with you that existence precedes essence, but …well, I just want to tell you I’ve been reading Nietzsche lately, and I don’t think I can agree with your egalitarian politics any more.
CROWD: Wooooo! Woooooo!
LOUIS: (shocked and disbelieving) Tina, this is crazy. You know that Sartre clarified all this way back in the 40s.
TINA: But he didn’t take into account Nietzsche’s radical critique of democratic morality, Louis. I’m sorry. I can’t ignore the contradiction any longer!
LOUIS: You got these ideas from Victor, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
TINA: Don’t you bring up Victor! I only turned to him when I saw you were seeing that dominatrix! I needed a real man! An Uber-man!
LOUIS: (sobbing) I couldn’t help it. It was my burden of freedom. It was too much!
JERRY: We’ve got someone here who might have something to add. Bring out… Victor!
Victor enters. He walks up to Louis and sticks a finger in his face.
VICTOR: Louis, you’re a classic post-Christian intellectual. Weak to the core!
LOUIS: (through tears) You can kiss my Marxist ass, Reactionary Boy!
VICTOR: Herd animal!
LOUIS: Lackey!
Louis throws a chair at Victor; they lock horns and wrestle. The crowd goes wild. After a long struggle, the security guys pry them apart.
JERRY: Okay, okay. It’s time for questions from the audience. Go ahead, sir.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, this is for Tina. Tina, I just wanna know how you can call yourself an existentialist, and still agree with Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Ubermensch. Doesn’t that imply a belief in intrinsic essences that is in direct contradiction with with the fundamental priniciples of existentialism?
TINA: No! No! It doesn’t. We can be equal in potential, without being equal in eventual personal quality. It’s a question of Becoming, not Being.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s just disguised essentialism! You’re no existentialist!
TINA: I am so!
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re no existentialist!
TINA: I am so an existentialist, bitch!
Ursula stands and interjects.
URSULA: What does it [bleep] matter? Existentialism is just a cover for late capitalist anti-feminism! Look at how Sartre treated Simone de Beauvoir!
Women in the crowd cheer and stomp.
TINA: [Bleep] you! Fat-ass Foucaultian ho!
URSULA: You only wish you were smart enough to understand Foucault, bitch!
TINA: You the bitch!
URSULA: No, you the bitch!
TINA: Whatever! Whatever!
JERRY: We’ll be right back with a final thought! Stay with us!
Commercial break for debt-consolidation loans, ITT Technical Institute, and Psychic Alliance Hotline.
JERRY: Hi! Welcome back. I just want to thank all our guests for being here, and say that I hope you’re able to work through your differences and find happiness, if indeed happiness can be extracted from the dismal miasma of warring primal hormonal impulses we call human relationship.
(turns to the camera)
Well, we all think philosophy is just fun and games. Semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian post-Freudian psychoanalysis, it all seems like good, clean fun. But when the heart gets involved, all our painfully acquired metaphysical insights go right out the window, and we’re reduced to battling it out like rutting chimpanzees. It’s not pretty. If you’re in a relationship, and differences over the fundamental principles of your respective subjectivities are making things difficult, maybe it’s time to move on. Find someone new, someone who will accept you and the way your laughably limited human intelligence chooses to codify and rationalize the chaos of existence. After all, in the absence of a clear, unquestionable revelation from G-d, that’s all we’re all doing anyway. So remember: take care of yourselves- and each other.
ANNOUNCER: Be sure to tune in next time, when KKK strippers battle it out with transvestite omnisexual porn stars! Tomorrow on Springer!
You can find both of these parodies online, if you know what you're looking for, but you're unlikely to stumble upon them, and you definitely won't find them by searching Google for "the origins of hipsterism." (Well, now you might.) This fact tends to suggest that the internet has chronological strata, and that there are all kinds of old jokes down there, waiting for someone to rediscover and study.
I went searching for---and found---the original March 1998 posting. Saving an old joke from GeoCities and reposting it on Facebook (and then again on LiveJournal?) is a little like preserving a record by making a YouTube video of your turntable. And caring about this enough to hunt it down and corroborate a creaking in-joke is, by Noah Brand's definition, hipster.
The URL mentioned below in the Jerry Springer sketch below doesn't work today (5/12/12). The best I can offer is this site which, though it points to what it says is the original posting and the author's website, are cobwebs (as of today, anyway).
Jenny Jones: Postmodernism Ruined My Life
The following is from the Buffalo POETICS list:
By MARK LEYNER, HOBOKEN, N.J.
JENNY JONES: Boy, we have a show for you today!
Recently, the University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty made the stunning declaration that nobody has “the foggiest idea” what postmodernism means. “It would be nice to get rid of it,” he said.
“It isn’t exactly an idea; it’s a word that pretends to stand for
an idea.”
This shocking admission that there is no such thing as postmodernism has produced a firestorm of protest around the country. Thousands of authors, critics and graduate students who’d considered themselves postmodernists are outraged at the betrayal.
Today we have with us a writer- a recovering postmodernist- who
believes that his literary career and personal life have been irreparably damaged by the theory, and who feels defrauded by the academics who promulgated it. He wishes to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him “Alex.”
Alex, as an adolescent, before you began experimenting with postmodernism, you considered yourself- what?
Close shot of ALEX.
An electronic blob obscures his face. Words appear at bottom of screen: “Says he was traumatized by postmodernism and blames academics.”
ALEX (his voice electronically altered): A high modernist. Y’know, Pound, Eliot, Georges Braque, Wallace Stevens, Arnold Schoenberg, Mies van der Rohe. I had all of Schoenberg’s 78s.
JENNY JONES: And then you started reading people like Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard- how did that change your feelings about your modernist heroes?
ALEX: I suddenly felt that they were, like, stifling and canonical.
JENNY JONES: Stifling and canonical? That is so sad, such a waste. How old were you when you first read Fredric Jameson?
ALEX: Nine, I think.
The AUDIENCE gasps.
JENNY JONES: We have some pictures of young Alex….
We see snapshots of 14-year-old ALEX reading Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” The AUDIENCE oohs and ahs.
ALEX: We used to go to a friend’s house after school- y’know, his
parents were never home- and we’d read, like, Paul Virilio and Julia Kristeva.
JENNY JONES: So you’re only 14, and you’re already skeptical toward
the “grand narratives” of modernity, you’re questioning any belief
system that claims universality or transcendence. Why?
ALEX: I guess- to be cool.
JENNY JONES: So, peer pressure?
ALEX: I guess.
JENNY JONES: And do you remember how you felt the very first time you entertained the notion that you and your universe are constituted by language- that reality is a cultural construct, a “text” whose meaning is determined by infinite associations with other “texts”?
ALEX: Uh, it felt, like, good. I wanted to do it again.
The AUDIENCE groans.
JENNY JONES: You were arrested at about this time?
ALEX: For spray-painting “The Hermeneutics of Indeterminacy” on an
overpass.
JENNY JONES: You’re the child of a mixed marriage- is that right?
ALEX: My father was a de Stijl Wittgensteinian and my mom was a neo-pre-Raphaelite.
JENNY JONES: Do you think that growing up in a mixed marriage made you more vulnerable to the siren song of postmodernism?
ALEX: Absolutely. It’s hard when you’re a little kid not to be able to just come right out and say (sniffles), y’know, I’m an Imagist or I’m a phenomenologist or I’m a post-painterly abstractionist. It’s really hard- especially around the holidays. (He cries.)
JENNY JONES: I hear you. Was your wife a postmodernist?
ALEX: Yes. She was raised avant-pop, which is a fundamentalist offshoot of postmodernism.
JENNY JONES: How did she react to Rorty’s admission that postmodernism was essentially a hoax?
ALEX: She was devastated. I mean, she’s got all the John Zorn albums and the entire Semiotext(e) series. She was crushed.
We see ALEX’S WIFE in the audience, weeping softly, her hands covering her face.
JENNY JONES: And you were raising your daughter as a postmodernist?
ALEX: Of course. That’s what makes this particularly tragic. I mean, how do you explain to a 5-year-old that self-consciously recycling cultural detritus is suddenly no longer a valid art form when, for her entire life, she’s been taught that it is?
JENNY JONES: Tell us how you think postmodernism affected your career as a novelist.
ALEX: I disavowed writing that contained real ideas or any real passion. My work became disjunctive, facetious and nihilistic. It was all blank parody, irony enveloped in more irony.
It merely recapitulated the pernicious banality of television and advertising. I found myself indiscriminately incorporating any and all kinds of pop kitsch and shlock. (He begins to weep again.)
JENNY JONES: And this spilled over into your personal life?
ALEX: It was impossible for me to experience life with any emotional intensity. I couldn’t control the irony anymore. I perceived my own feelings as if they were in quotes.
I italicized everything and everyone. It became impossible for me to appraise the quality of anything. To me everything was equivalent- the Brandenburg Concertos and the Lysol jingle had the same value…. (He breaks down, sobbing.)
JENNY JONES: Now, you’re involved in a lawsuit, aren’t you?
ALEX: Yes. I’m suing the Modern Language Association.
JENNY JONES: How confident are you about winning?
ALEX: We need to prove that, while they were actively propounding it, academics knew all along that postmodernism was a specious theory.
If we can unearth some intradepartmental memos- y’know, a paper trail- any corroboration that they knew postmodernism was worthless cant at the same time they were teaching it, then I think we have an excellent shot at establishing liability.
JENNY JONES wades into audience and proffers microphone to a woman.
WOMAN (with lateral head-bobbing): It’s ironic that Barry Scheck is representing the M.L.A. in this litigation because Scheck is the postmodern attorney par excellence. This is the guy who’s made a career of volatilizing truth in the simulacrum of exculpation!
VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: You go, girl!
WOMAN: Scheck is the guy who came up with the quintessentially postmodern re-bleed defense for O. J., which claims that O.J. merely vigorously shook Ron and Nicole, thereby re-aggravating pre-existing knife wounds. I’d just like to say to any client of
Barry Scheck- lose that zero and get a hero!
The AUDIENCE cheers wildly.
WOMAN: Uh, I forgot my question.
Dissolve to message on screen: If you believe that mathematician Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem has caused you or a member of your family to dress too provocatively, call (800) 555-9455.
Dissolve back to studio. In the audience, JENNY JONES extends the microphone to a man in his mid-30s with a scruffy beard and a bandana around his head.
MAN WITH BANDANA: I’d like to say that this “Alex” is the single worst example of pointless irony in American literature, and this whole heartfelt renunciation of postmodernism is a ploy- it’s just more irony.
The AUDIENCE whistles and hoots.
ALEX: You think this is a ploy?! (He tears futilely at the electronic blob.) This is my face!
The AUDIENCE recoils in horror.
ALEX: This is what can happen to people who naively embrace postmodernism, to people who believe that the individual- the autonomous, individualist subject- is dead. They become a palimpsest of media pastiche- a mask of metastatic irony.
JENNY JONES (biting lip and shaking her head): That is so sad. Alex- final words?
ALEX: I’d just like to say that self-consciousness and irony seem like fun at first, but they can destroy your life. I know. You gotta be earnest, be real. Real feelings are important. Objective reality does exist.
AUDIENCE members whoop, stomp and pump fists in the air.
JENNY JONES: I’d like to thank Alex for having the courage to come on today and share his experience with us.
Join us for tomorrow’s show, “The End of Manichean, Bipolar Geopolitics Turned My Boyfriend Into an Insatiable Sex Freak (and I Love It!)”
I have a philosophical secret!
The Lowest-Rated Jerry Springer Show Ever
By Sean Hartigan (www.madhouse.org/ulro)
CROWD: Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!
JERRY: Today’s guests are here because they can’t agree on fundamental philosophical principles. I’d like to welcome Todd to the show.
Todd enters from backstage.
JERRY: Hello, Todd.
TODD: Hi, Jerry.
JERRY: (reading from card) So, Todd, you’re here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?
TODD: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for three years now. We did everything together. We were really inseparable. But then she discovered post-Marxist political and literary theory, and it’s been nothing but fighting ever since.
JERRY: Why is that?
TODD: You see, Jerry, I’m a traditional Cartesian rationalist. I believe that the individual self, the “I” or ego is the foundation of all metaphysics. She, on the other hand, believes that the contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist consumerist discourse.
CROWD: Ooooohhhh!
TODD: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?
JERRY: So what do you want to tell her today?
TODD: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism, we’re through. I just can’t go on having a relationship with a woman who doesn’t believe I exist.
JERRY: Well, you’re going to get your chance. Here’s Ursula!
Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.
URSULA: Patriarchal colonizer!
She slaps him viciously. Todd leaps up, but the security guys pull them apart before things can go any further.
URSULA: Don’t listen to him! Logic is a male hysteria! Rationality equals oppression and the silencing of marginalized voices!
TODD: The classical methodology of rational dialectic is our only road to truth! Don’t try to deny it!
URSULA: You and your dialectic! That’s how it’s been through our whole relationship, Jerry. Mindless repetition of the post-Enlightenment meta-narrative. “You have to start with radical doubt, Ursula.” “Post-structuralism is just classical sceptical thought re-cast in the language of semiotics, Ursula.”
CROWD: Booo! Booo!
JERRY: Well, Ursula, come on. Don’t you agree that the roots of contemporary neo-Leftism simply have to be sought in Enlightenment political philosophy?
URSULA: History is the discourse of powerful centrally located voices marginalizing and de-scribing the sub-altern!
TODD: See what I have to put up with? Do you know what it’s like living with someone who sees sex as a metaphoric demonstration of the anti-feminist violence implicit in the discourse of the dominant power structure? It’s terrible. She just lies there and thinks of Andrea Dworkin. That’s why we never do it any more.
CROWD: Wooooo!
URSULA: You liar! Why don’t you tell them how you haven’t been able to get it up for the past three months because you couldn’t decide if your penis truly had essential Being, or was simply a manifestation of Mind?
TODD: Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
URSULA: It’s true!
JERRY: Well, I don’t think we’re going to solve this one right away. Our next guests are Louis and Tina. And Tina has a little confession to make!
Louis and Tina come onstage. Todd and Ursula continue bickering in the background.
JERRY: Tina, you are… (reads cards)… an existentialist, is that right?
TINA: That’s right, Jerry. And Louis is, too.
JERRY: And what did you want to tell Louis today?
TINA: Jerry, today I want to tell him…
JERRY: Talk to Louis. Talk to him.
Crowd hushes.
TINA: Louis… I’ve loved you for a long time….
LOUIS: I love you, too, Tina.
TINA: Louis, you know I agree with you that existence precedes essence, but …well, I just want to tell you I’ve been reading Nietzsche lately, and I don’t think I can agree with your egalitarian politics any more.
CROWD: Wooooo! Woooooo!
LOUIS: (shocked and disbelieving) Tina, this is crazy. You know that Sartre clarified all this way back in the 40s.
TINA: But he didn’t take into account Nietzsche’s radical critique of democratic morality, Louis. I’m sorry. I can’t ignore the contradiction any longer!
LOUIS: You got these ideas from Victor, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
TINA: Don’t you bring up Victor! I only turned to him when I saw you were seeing that dominatrix! I needed a real man! An Uber-man!
LOUIS: (sobbing) I couldn’t help it. It was my burden of freedom. It was too much!
JERRY: We’ve got someone here who might have something to add. Bring out… Victor!
Victor enters. He walks up to Louis and sticks a finger in his face.
VICTOR: Louis, you’re a classic post-Christian intellectual. Weak to the core!
LOUIS: (through tears) You can kiss my Marxist ass, Reactionary Boy!
VICTOR: Herd animal!
LOUIS: Lackey!
Louis throws a chair at Victor; they lock horns and wrestle. The crowd goes wild. After a long struggle, the security guys pry them apart.
JERRY: Okay, okay. It’s time for questions from the audience. Go ahead, sir.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, this is for Tina. Tina, I just wanna know how you can call yourself an existentialist, and still agree with Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Ubermensch. Doesn’t that imply a belief in intrinsic essences that is in direct contradiction with with the fundamental priniciples of existentialism?
TINA: No! No! It doesn’t. We can be equal in potential, without being equal in eventual personal quality. It’s a question of Becoming, not Being.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s just disguised essentialism! You’re no existentialist!
TINA: I am so!
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re no existentialist!
TINA: I am so an existentialist, bitch!
Ursula stands and interjects.
URSULA: What does it [bleep] matter? Existentialism is just a cover for late capitalist anti-feminism! Look at how Sartre treated Simone de Beauvoir!
Women in the crowd cheer and stomp.
TINA: [Bleep] you! Fat-ass Foucaultian ho!
URSULA: You only wish you were smart enough to understand Foucault, bitch!
TINA: You the bitch!
URSULA: No, you the bitch!
TINA: Whatever! Whatever!
JERRY: We’ll be right back with a final thought! Stay with us!
Commercial break for debt-consolidation loans, ITT Technical Institute, and Psychic Alliance Hotline.
JERRY: Hi! Welcome back. I just want to thank all our guests for being here, and say that I hope you’re able to work through your differences and find happiness, if indeed happiness can be extracted from the dismal miasma of warring primal hormonal impulses we call human relationship.
(turns to the camera)
Well, we all think philosophy is just fun and games. Semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian post-Freudian psychoanalysis, it all seems like good, clean fun. But when the heart gets involved, all our painfully acquired metaphysical insights go right out the window, and we’re reduced to battling it out like rutting chimpanzees. It’s not pretty. If you’re in a relationship, and differences over the fundamental principles of your respective subjectivities are making things difficult, maybe it’s time to move on. Find someone new, someone who will accept you and the way your laughably limited human intelligence chooses to codify and rationalize the chaos of existence. After all, in the absence of a clear, unquestionable revelation from G-d, that’s all we’re all doing anyway. So remember: take care of yourselves- and each other.
ANNOUNCER: Be sure to tune in next time, when KKK strippers battle it out with transvestite omnisexual porn stars! Tomorrow on Springer!