Pedro Reyes, creator of Palas por Pistolas, has come to the Walker Art Center to present Baby Marx, "a puppet show for television that lightheartedly but effectively addresses capitalist, socialist-economic and cultural systems through the eyes of children, Karl Marx and Adam Smith."
Aiding, interpreting, intervening, questioning and perhaps at times obscuring Reyes were academics Michael Hardt and Lauren Berlant.
Hardt, a "Marxologist," points out that Marx most often appears in popular political discourse under a "shroud of ridicule," and Reyes replied that this fact directs us toward the use of comedy; as Berlant clarified later, we mock him to take him seriously. And even though we mock him in a comedy, still, in the show, we see a world in which he has a role. (Coming soon to the show: Lenin, Lukacs, and moral sentiments.)
Hardt comes up with a fun heuristic for the "ontology of the puppet:" puppets are manipulated by masters, and so play a victim's role; puppet's are little fetishes, substitutes for people, and so symbolize commodification; in this villain's role, they still play in a victim narrative as much as when they are victims themselves. Better, Hardt, finds, to see the puppet as "concepts in action," symbolizing the categorical considerations like "workers" that characterize Marx's thought in the larger sense. Berlant jumped in to say that this understanding of the puppets is further revealed by the fact that we see the puppets as puppets, and the puppets see themselves as puppets, which lends puppets freedom and spontaneity.
This is contrast to "the laboring puppets" we have all become; we take Sudafed, for example, to convince our bodies we are well, which means these days that we are able to work. Improvisation has an important role here in allowing "collaborative and relational sovereignty," which I suppose all adds up to saying it breaks down the victim narrative, the narrative of master-slave, the narrative of we are our work.
There was much discussion and interest in how comedy can aid teaching. "Academics are not funny...well, you are funny, but academics are not," said Reyes, referring in his "you" to Hardt and to Berlant, but really only to Berlant, which illustrates his point (and seems to me funny). He mentioned that his model of Frederick Winslow Taylor, pioneer of "the efficiency movement," is based on the sand-clock, the metronome, indicating Taylor's deep interest in time, but also mocking his worldview and pulling up his bias.
On a darker note, Berlant, whose own work so often returns to "political depression," reminds us that it is a dark and complex thing to entertain with stories of exploitation and pain, but that this is just what she tries to do in her work. Hardt adds that so often we fall victim to a "fatality of the present," that is, the feeling that as large as the world's problems are, it is impossible to change any of them. Humor and irony, in the best cases, help us breathe through this dread, this depression. Old-style Rabelasian comedy, as Berlant explains, drew Gargantua in all its grotesqueness to make it small; today's John Stewart routines create shared worlds of alienation ("Wtf?" Berlant calls it.)
Riots in London reflect a jobs problem, a problem of youth having nothing to do. Meanwhile governments effect "regimes of solidarity" and reject any notion of socializing wealth -- though they are happy to "socialize the pain." What the new comedy like "Baby Marx" can do seems related, Berlant finds, to "the situation tragedy," which presents selves always on the edge of the abyss (Berlant mentions "The Office" ; I think of "Weeds"). Comedy can also be the strategic nonsense, the unsense (Marcuse) that opens up new pathways of thought. Just think, as Mingus did, of “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was Your Mother.”
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