Excisions: 2

I mentioned in a couple of previous posts that I decided to excise a number of the memes that were going to be part of my book. It was sufficient for a meme to be excluded that I did not envisage being able to write anything of interest (to me) in the commentary on it. I have now set myself the goal of posting the excised memes here, in an occasional series, and trying to write something of interest (to me) about them, thus proving my decision to exclude them mistaken! Also, in this parergonal space around the book, I will write about the memes without the pretense that their maker is someone other than myself. I am curious to see how this affects the nature of my writing about the memes.

Posted on Facebook on March 1st, 2016. The meme represents a cross-over between the world of Batman memes and the real world, my world, of academia in both content and circumstance. It was occasioned by an email from my department chair to the faculty, asking (for a second time) for volunteers to go to an impending graduation ceremony at which philosophy students would be walking. To the best of my knowledge, neither the locution “walk with x at graduation” nor the suggested practice exists, but I needed a way to imply that Batman was expected to wear academic regalia and not merely be in the audience in his Bat-Civvies, so to speak, to watch Robin graduate.

In fact, the meme was was not just occasioned by my chair’s email. It constituted my reply-to-all to it. So in this sense, the cross-over between Batman and academia was not confined to the meme’s content. It was the first time in which there was a real connection between the Batman Meme Project and my academic world. It was also the first time I confronted my colleagues, en bloc, with evidence of the Batman Meme Project. (A couple were Facebook friends and may have seen some of the previous 20 memes I had posted there by that point.) Even though I had not yet fully conceived of the philosophical work that these memes would become a part of, sending the meme in an email to my colleagues was nonetheless a sort of  philosophical ‘coming out.’ So in a way, given its content and history, and the way they are intertwined, the meme epitomizes the entire book, A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!.

I remember, after I sent that reply-to-all, being a little apprehensive at the step I had taken. What would my colleagues make of my conducting departmental business with Batman memes? What would they make of the meme itself? Predictably, I need not have worried. No-one gave any acknowledgment of it at all. My meme fell still-born from the meme generator. Not a smile in the corridor (or smiley face in an email). Not an irritated “what?” Not a concern that I was having a midlife crisis. And now, here I am, joining in the silence by excluding the meme from the book. Am I trying to reassure my colleagues? “Don’t worry! That was an accident. Won’t happen again! Look, it’s gone!”

If the meme and its initial distribution somehow represent the collision between Batman memes and academic philosophy that the book as a whole embodies, its chilly reception by a bunch of philosophers anticipates the subsequent vicissitudes of my project. Somewhat to my surprise, as I have made parts of the project public and talked about it in various places, I have encountered a small amount of outright hostility and a much larger amount of what I would call “baffled indifference” (if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms).

I have, as you would expect, thought long and hard about the reaction my project elicits. I don’t think it is a result of wanting to use Batman memes in philosophy per se. I can imagine ways of using them that I guess would not get the same response. But the particular use I make of them is to heighten all the peculiarities and dissatisfactions that have attended my own trajectory through philosophy.  I won’t attempt a full accounting of those here. The book itself is for that. But super-briefly, I have not settled anywhere; my work has repeatedly shifted its focus and a number of papers are one-off interventions in areas I am not expert in. As a result of this, I have found I have had to struggle to be heard. As happens to all those who engage in this struggle, my voice has had to contort itself and express itself, finally, through acting out. A ‘slap’ delivered by email to my philosophical colleagues or underlying an experimental philosophical work is an utterance in the language of hysteria. And for those not highly attuned to it, the language of hysteria must always elicit baffled indifference.

OK, that’s two for two! Once again, what I have written about this meme makes me sorry that it is being cut from the book. But here is a case where it would have been much more difficult for me to write a commentary on these lines in the book, where the commentator is notionally distinct from the meme-maker. (More difficult, but perhaps not impossible, since I approach some similar issues in my commentary to another meme.)