The Dean of 'Type of Guy' Studies

Satire, Critique and "Just Atrocities"

In a pivotal scene in the movie Wayne’s World (Wayne is having his first heart-to-heart conversation with Cassandra, his love interest, a total babe), Wayne says, “Was it Dick Van Patten or Kierkegaard who said, ‘If you label me, you negate me?’” I’m not sure if Kierkegaard said that or not, but it is the kind of thing he would say: if you put a label on someone you restrict their Being to narrow confines, corral their potential into a pen.

I thnk there’s something to this. As I talked about in the last post, insults are often typological, they are effective because they rapid reduce the fullness of people’s lives and put their (we think) inflated self-conception in their place. “What am I? Some kind of jerk?” People do not like labels because they proscribe what they can do, think, or imagine. At the same time, people seek out labels, probably because they proscribe what they can do, think, or imagine. It removes some of the pressure, but then quickly grows unsatisfying. Do we really want to just be that guy. (I was reading something recently where they used the original sense of “guy,” an effigy, from the burning of effigies on Guy Fawkes Night.)

On the Internet, people take particular glee in identifying different “types of guys.” These are meant to be witty caricatures of people you might encounter in modern life: they are both very particular and universal, they are funny when we recognize the type even in a quite specific description. Sometimes in an innocent way, sometimes more maliciously, they are meant to be demeaning. Sometimes they are just totally imaginary, and say more about people’s own preoccupations and projections than the world. I think this is really not different from what goes on in all literary and theoretical production: we really enjoy a brilliant characterization in a book, not only for their singularity, but for when it gets a certain type, puts the butterfly on the pin.

j--n @vitaminintake

A definitive list of the types of people online. Tag yourselves

In Diderot’s dialogue Rameau’s Nephew, which is apparently becoming a preoccupation of this blog, there’s a section where the nephew, says the worst thing you can call someone is an éspece, literally a species, more capaciously, a type: “They are the ones we call “types,” of all descriptions the worst, because it indicates mediocrity and the lowest degree of contempt. A great scoundrel is a great scoundrel; he isn’t a “type.” In Hegel’s commentary, he points out that the alienation implicit in cultural development makes everyone actually a type, we have to specify ourselves in various roles, professions, styles of dress, attitudes, the realm of culture is where we become recognizable types.

Marx was also great satirist, his great target of course was the bourgeoisie, perhaps the most mediocre type imaginable, the type of all types. Recently I was reading Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and I was struck by this passage:

The fantastic urgency with which Marx returns again and again to the bourgeois economy is therefore neither an academic-theoretical fanaticism nor simply a technical-tactical interest in his opponent. This insistence derives from a thoroughly metaphysical compulsion….That the bourgeoisie is correctly under- stood again provides the evidence that its era is at an end. The tautology of Hegelian as well as of Marxist certainty moves in such circles, and provides a “self-guarantee’ of its own truth. The scientific certainty that the historical moment of the proletariat has arrived is first produced, therefore, by a correct understanding of the process of development. The bourgeoisie cannot grasp the proletariat, but the proletariat can certainly grasp the bourgeoisie. With this the sun begins to set on the age of the bourgeoisie; the owl of Minerva begins its flight.

The proletariat, Schmitt writes is “negatively conceived..In contrast, the bourgeoisie must be known positively and in its full historicity.” The obsession of Marx goes beyond the easy wit of the satirist: he really has to nail down scientifically what the bourgeoisie is. Once he can do that, he has captured the bourgeoisie is captured in the net of concepts, and is therefore no longer alive and active, its time is done. But perhaps this insistence on scientificity, rigor, exactness is just the dialectical victory of the bourgeoisie via the backdoor: by the reduction of its opponents to a bourgeois type, The Professor. The Type of Guy obsessed with Types of Guy?

Peter Sloterdijk in his Critique of Cynical Reason regrets the transformation of Enlightenment from a satirical discourse into a formal critique:

Recent ideology critique already appears in respectable garb, and in Marxism and especially in psychoanalysis is has even put on suit and tie, so as to completely assume the air of bourgeois respectability. It has given up life as satire, in order to win its position in books as ‘theory.’ From the lively form of heated polemic it has retreaded in a cold war of consciousness. Heinrich Heine was one of the last authors of classical enlightenment who literarily defended, in open satire, the right of ideology critique to “just atrocities”

Kierkegaard, too, was very harsh on the professors, they were the ultimate form of pedantry, philistinism and soullessness: “Yes, you assistant professor, of all the loathsome inhumans the most loathsome.” He particularly thought little of philosophers who thought thinking was doing and doing was thinking, perhaps an unfair accusation from someone who did little more than think all day. Of course, when it was time for him to be caricatured in the newspaper, Kierkegaard was deeply wounded by the experience, felt it to be monstrously unjust and made quite a martyr out of himself. Nothing could be worse in his mind to be reduced to a type.