I’m preparing a lecture at the moment on the topic of work/labour in The Simpsons; at three hours, I have more than enough time to belabour the point that neoliberal capitalism is killing us all, that women are exploited through the function of ideology in often invisible ways, and then, finally, that cultural products are very good at hiding their investment in the very systems they critique.
The problem, for me, is trying to disentangle my politics from the analysis I am encouraging. Of course I’m used to the easy determination that there is no exteriority between analysis and politics, that ‘objectivity’ is a myth structure that is just as surely a political position as any other, and that education, in its broadest sense, encompasses social criticism. (That’s right, I use the Oxford comma now.)
Yet it’s about here that I find myself reading over my speaking script and wondering. The problem with The Simpsons is the same problem that the historian Nicholas Branch faces in Don DeLillo’s Libra: at 492 episodes (and counting) there is a seemingly infinite amount of source material, I’m up to my ears in it, it explodes out of drawers and bubbles up beneath the carpet.
Thus I return to that awful word in literary studies, methodology; or, more precisely, I return to the fact that my selection ‘method’ is to remember those shows that seem relevant from my long memory of watching The Simpsons. What I find is that the episodes I remember are those that support my political orientation; what I find is that the structures of my memory are shot through with my politics. Am I, I begin to wonder, in fact just watching own biases played out in front of me?
It’s about here, though, that I realize that not everyone is as reflexive about analysis. If, instead of worrying that my structures determine my readings, I just thought ‘this is right’, or, ‘look what I found’, I’d be a lot less worried. If, rather than searching for exteriority between the structures of knowledge and the structures of discourse, I searched for the Truth, well, things would be a lot easier.
Which brings me to the final problem, the title of this post, where the reflexive researcher meets the disciplinary imagination. I have to mark essays, after all. What will I do if my students start quoting Ayn Rand at me? Is that analysis? We are always told that a well-made argument will ‘stand’ on its own merits: another one of those ‘sta’ words that imply that argumentation is stationary. But what if argumentation doesn’t work like that; what if the relationship of language, politics and analysis is a lot more complex than the marking schedules would allow?
Perhaps you are trying to do too much at once? Start with those episodes you remember – for whatever reason, and work with those. Declare your bias; position yourself.
After that, you can either go back and write a whole new lecture that argues the opposite, or rely on academia to take its course: someone might come along who questions everything you say with a valid basis. Then you can think about whether you agree with them or not.
Yes, position yourself. And position your starting point: work/labour in The Simpsons. There’s a whole lot implicit in that to begin with, ideologically. It should establish the boundaries and logic of your enquiry.
I think it’s worth starting out by asking–at least of yourself–that very methodological of questions: Why do I even think this is a half reasonable project to begin with? Work/labour; The Simpsons. What makes them go together? An answer might touch on certain defining features of the show: the working class American family; the ‘cool’ underachieving boy/dorky overachieving girl; Burns; Smithers; nuclear power plants; Duff beer; Marge and Homer as figures of gender. There’s a whole lot there, surely, that tends to imply or articulate the logic of what you’re doing.
And what are you doing? I mean, what’s your underlying assumption? That a show such as this is a good place to look for a distilled exploration of work/labour in our times? That the show defines itself in certain terms (see above) and therefore its resonances should concern/relate to certain contemporary conditions, like the subjectivity of the labourer/consumer for example–and not others, like Australian national identity or whatever?
So there’s a certain basic tie-in between your theoretical stuff, the show, and you. [Love that Oxford comma.] Also audience in general is an important question in this matrix. The Simpsons is interesting because it has the kind of John Stewart liberal-educated-middle-class audience, but presumably (I’m guessing) it also has quite a big working class, fairly conservative audience.
An Ayn Rand tie-in would be less implicit, but it could still be there. It would have to, in order to be intellectually coherent, acknowledge [massively split infinitives are also fun at times] the show’s non-Ayn-Rand biases and work from there. And it couldn’t simply be proselytizing–like, you know, how Marge’s life would be better if she discovered rational self-interest (though surely one of those 492 episodes has involved that very discovery)–because that just wouldn’t integrate with the logic of the show I don’t think. But maybe there could be an interesting discussion of Moe as a model Randian embittered by a life lived among losers and slackers, or something.
It’s not a question of an argument “standing on its merits” but really of it simply being an argument–actually possessing the necessary characteristics. If it does that, and only that, and it stays within the assigned parameters, then it gets an A+ right? When it comes to humanities essays, marking schedules are pretty much bullshit: they simply help the marker to feel like they’re not being arbitrary. I always found my use of them delightfully tendentious.
So if randomly remembering episodes is your selection criteria, that has to be part of your argument, and it makes sense that it is: there’s an acknowledged surfeit of relevant stuff, and you’re taking bits that you recall, less perhaps because they fulfil your desire to have your politics affirmed by the show (pretty much everything in the show does that) than because they seem to you emblematic of what the show is about. Of course there’s something arbitrary and untestable about this–but remember, underlying it all is the quite basic assumption that you are somehow qualified to be the guy at the front of the room, and that there’s something in that that we can rely upon.
Whew.
…and with that, I realized that I am woefully unprepared for the kind of theoretical questions that will be thrown at me, not only by this lecture but my future study.
Yes: the very fact that I consider work/labour to be at issue in The Simpsons is probably, well, due to the fact that it is constantly representing alienation, dissatisfaction, that is to say, the experience of being an employee. And that’s not just Homer, but the whole surfeit of (usually male) workers out there who are both incompetent and distanced from the very idea production. The assumption from which I begin, I think, is that the show is a kind of drama upon which the labour history of the last twenty years–and probably the ten years before that–have been played out. Not only because of the show’s history, which is riddled with strikes, disputes, dealings with Rupert Murdoch, but because of the ways in which it shows power operating through work. What I think we see is the constant recapitulation of the controllers of capital over the interests of the individual, played out through ideological and disciplinary mechanisms.
On the question of the viewers, well, I’m going to be looking at that tomorrow when I have access to a library. As a side note, I’m horrified by the dearth of academic study on the show, and even worse, the fact that the research that is available is often facile and poorly modelled. The culture warriors, it seems, have won this round.
Thanks for your comments. It’s kind of reassuring to have people with actual degrees (not just one of those BA [Hons] they probably hand out as promotional posters these days), engaging with the problems of positioning, methodology and the very idea of analysis .
You’re not “woefully unprepared.” I’ve read your lecture; it’s great. Also, you assume that your students are going to ask you terribly complicated questions. Usually, that doesn’t happen, because you know more than they do. If it comes to “the worst,” tell them you will think about it and get back to them. Have a little faith in yourself. Then again, one day, when you have completed your PhD, you will come to this Faustian realisation:
“Da stehe ich nun, ich armer Thor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.”
* And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand! no wiser than before.
The more you learn, the more you realise you don’t know. Academia is a masochistic exercise. There’s nothing you can do about that – except accept the never-ending challenge, and hold on to your sanity in the process. Good luck with that… >:]
What Frogmouth said.
Challenging questions are good. They help. Answering them helps.
People can get very nervous about the sense that there is no ultimate foundation for everything they think that they know, and it turns them into intellectual bigots. In fact, exploring the contours, unafraid, of that unknowing is where thinking is most personal and exciting and ultimately fruitful: you come back to the surface better able to articulate and imagine what you are doing.