Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, Volume 29, 2017
Abstract: This article analyses the IFC sitcom Maron (2013-2016) and compares Maron‘s semi-fictional episodic narratives to current scholarly debates surrounding the status of philosophical aesthetics in a postmodernist television market. This article engages with Adornoian and Kantian dialogues of aesthetics and postmodern theory. It is argued that the televison series Maron does not attempt to solve the contradictions of Kantian or Adornoian theories of judgement or aesthetic taste, it merely presents such philosophies on screen to encourage the viewer to assess the universal judgments of television as an artificial and inauthentic medium of art.
Walking into a dinner party held for esteemed academic guests at an American university, the comedian Marc Maron awkwardly walks into the room scanning the place for somewhere to hide. The party’s moody lighting, tinkling martini glasses and fancy dress attire horrify him. Marc is painfully self-conscious; he is a stand-up comedian, not a serious literary academic – what is he even going to say to these people? After fumbling his way into a group conversation, Marc’s self-consciousness suddenly vanishes. “So I hear Mindy got $2 million for a book!” exclaims a scholar excitedly. Puzzled, Marc realises that she is referencing Mindy Kaling, the famous American actress and comedian. “You are from literature and you are talking about Mindy Kaling?” Marc questions back. “We’re off the clock” shrugs the scholar, who then continues her conversation with the remainder of the group. This small scene from the autobiographical IFC sitcom Maron (2013-) represents exactly what this paper aims to analyse.
This paper will explore how (the character) Marc Maron witnesses and engages with hyperconscious references outside of the Maron text itself; a dialogue that causes him to question the authenticity and artificiality of the television medium in regards to its self-reflexivity, where his understandings of anti-art have suddenly transformed into a universal appreciation of utopian beauty to be appreciated by all. This paper will analyse such aesthetic transformations by continuing the scholarly trend of referring to the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Theodor W. Adorno to legitimise the theory of TV aesthetics. What is particular about Maron is that the show does not attempt to solve the contradictions of Kantian or Adornoian theories of judgement or aesthetic taste, it merely presents such philosophies on screen to encourage the viewer to assess the universal judgments of television as an artificial and inauthentic medium of art. It should be noted that this paper brings together traditional theories of with postmodernist theories of pastiche, hyperconsciousness and parody. The deliberate interlace of theories was deeply inspired by Linda Hutcheon’s theorisation of postmodern poetics, whereby postmodernist art defines itself to be “contradictory art that still installs order…to demystify everyday processes of structuring chaos…and assigning meaning” (Hutcheon 79).
Before this paper closely examines the authenticity of Maron’s representation of philosophical aesthetics, it is useful to note how exactly Maron sets up its construction of such philosophical aesthetics. Due to its autobiographical nature, Maron relies on storytelling technologies of podcasting and YouTube videos to distinguish between inauthentic and immediate art forms from the authentic expressions of Marc Maron’s stand-up comedy. The entire narrative basis for Maron lies in Marc’s own autobiographical transformation from the drunken and drug addicted, lowly bankrupt travelling comic to a comic who has translated his angry stand-up act into a reflective, sober revealing interviewer style on his podcast WTF with Marc Maron (Meserko 797). If we are to examine authenticity in newly developed art forms such as the podcast, it is interesting to note Merserko’s argument that it is ‘the fans’ who are now assessing Marc’s authenticity as opposed to the TV critic. For Meserko, Maron’s authenticity as a comedian can only exist in pure form if it is acknowledged and responded to by Marc’s fans; that authenticity is not simply a concept projected onto an audience without seeking some kind of interaction first. Meserko’s argument is highly similar to the philosopher Charles Guignon, who suggests that authenticity “was once an exclusively inward looking meditative exercise, but it is also one that becomes observable and manifests through human actions” (Guignon 7). What the two philosophical views advocate are a kind of duality whereby authenticity requires a certain amount of self-reflexive behaviour by the person viewing (or listening) to the artist as the viewer has their own self-awareness of authenticity in regard to their own character. Perhaps what Meserko and Guignon suggest is that authenticity gives the viewer a conceptual way to arrive at an understanding of what is ‘the real’ (Taylor 33). If an audience is able to perceive what is real, then they are engaging with aesthetics in a way where authenticity is seen as an ‘aspirational ideal’ where one’s sense of their own personal authenticity is used as the basis for their judgement about another’s perceived authenticity (Meserko 801).
To begin the study of inauthenticity and artificiality of Maron and therefore philosophical aesthetics within television, one should firstly consider the most pressing area for discussion that is the ontology of television in relation to art history and philosophy. As Noël Carroll believes, the theory of art has become so conceptually linked to philosophical aesthetics that now the former reduces the latter, where two previous separate fields of inquiry have merged into one (20). Despite the confusion between art history and philosophical aesthetics, Carroll’s claim supports the idea of holding artworks to a hierarchy in art. In order for television to escape the label of inauthenticity or artificiality as a medium, TV would need to somehow expose its allegiance to either philosophy or art history to be considered a purer, authentic medium of creativity. Perhaps other than Immanuel Kant, the most commonly referred to philosopher of aesthetics by television scholars is Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s theory of aesthetics also seeks to establish a hierarchy of authenticity in modern art, much like Noël Carroll’s approach. Adorno firmly believes that modern art should avoid ‘utopian’ narratives that request that the viewer participate in illusory or false depictions of the real world (Hahn 60). For Adorno, artworks that aim to display any kind of emotionally comforting utopia are untruthful artworks, the equivalent of aesthetic inauthenticity. A modern artwork therefore, can be differentiated from the rest of art history because such artworks “detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity” (Adorno 2). In using the term ‘detach’ Adorno suggests that there is a hierarchical distinction between serious and immediate art, between depictions of the real world as truth verses utopia as a fabricated lie. If Adorno’s serious art calls for a kind of negative engagement with art that “appeals to sense and intellect”, he defines immediate art to be any artwork that belongs to the culture industry that repetitively demands desire from the viewer with the intention of removing them from access to the unbearable truths of the real world (Hammer 256).
If we were to apply Adorno’s anti-utopia philosophy to television aesthetics, it appears that Adorno’s philosophy mirrors Guignon and Meserko’s earlier assumptions. However, if we consider the newness of such attitudes to television and Maron’s place within postmodernist television, the issue arises of whether Guignon and Meserko’s process can actually be performed. If we consider the argument put forth by Fredric Jameson, postmodernist art is inauthentic due to pastiche, the ‘new aesthetic’ that is the death of aestheticism in the arts (27). While pastiche has generally come to refer to artworks that change the content of an original work while retaining the original’s form and purpose, Jameson goes further to propose that the re-assemblage and borrowing between original artworks and new procedures results in the abolition of auteurs, individualism and personality (Kiremidjian 17; O’Brien 43). While Maron provides no solution to Jameson’s view, Maron does pictorially represent the blending of each philosophical argument through Marc Maron’s engagement with immediate art in order to pictorially represent the fact that postmodernist television continues to respond to the hierarchical structure of philosophical aesthetics so it can continue to be labelled as an artificial medium.
Marc Maron specifically engages with hierarchical authenticity in relation to audience participation and pastiche in the episode ‘Marc’s Niece’ (Richie Keen, 2015) in season three. In an attempt to bond with his 15-year-old niece Sydney who is staying with him for the weekend, Marc ask general questions about what she is currently into, art-wise. Excitedly, Sydney shows Marc a short clip of her favourite YouTuber ‘Shad’, who asks straight into the camera “Be my bae?” while love-heart stickers and candy decorated wallpapers flicker rapidly around him. Marc attempts to undercut Sydney’s enthusiasm for YouTube art by stating, “I feel like I was just assaulted with a barrage of no talent” and asks if Shad is “a Pokémon”. Throughout his career, Marc Maron’s comedy style has consistently depended upon Marc’s highly anxious and negative jokes about the world. Representing Adornoian philosophy that engages with negative but truthful aesthetics, Shad’s performance as an entertainer of pastiche falls low on Marc’s hierarchy of authentic art. Where Marc utilizes ‘natural’ backgrounds of his garage or an empty stage when recording his podcast or performing stand-up, Shad’s use of the imaginative green screen to pull the heartstrings of Sydney (so that she might fantasies about him) creates a utopian narrative that defies Marc’s understanding of authentic comedy because recognisable aesthetics and comedic content has been sacrificed by Shad in order to participate in the game of postmodernist pastiche for followers and likes. The situation becomes complex later in the episode when Marc finds himself filming a video with Shad in an attempt to impress Sydney. After Marc continuously fails to ‘pop up’ into camera correctly and proclaims his hatred for Shad during a segment ironically called ‘Who you hatin’?’ Marc finally shouts, “You’re just making crap! Or let me rephrase that, content!” In a moment of shame, Marc comes to the conclusion that his instant dislike of Shad’s earlier video stems from his failure to create an aesthetic comedic utopia either through his podcast or his stand-up for Sydney to regard as authentic; inevitably falling back on the Adornoian perspective that negative art should trump utopian pastiche. As Espen Hammer describes, at the end of the episode Marc finds himself in a “sensibility informed by a critical attitude” (256). After participating in Shad’s aesthetics despite his hatred for it, Marc learns how to respond adequately to such low hierarchical artworks which is “an essential part of knowing not only how to interpret it but also how to distinguish art from non-art” (Hammer 256). Through the visual representation of overlapping philosophical arguments, Maron displays a genuine desire for appreciation of authentic art by engaging directly with content of the artwork critically, regardless of its negative or utopian philosophical status.
The second aesthetic debate Maron engages in to decipher the criteria between authenticity and artificiality happens in regard to Immanuel Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgement and Jim Collins’ theory of postmodern hyperconsciousness. In his analysis of postmodernist television, Collins outlines that a key postmodernist condition is the endless circulation of signs within the “information explosion” (Collins 193). Collins defines hyperconsciousness as “a hyperawareness on behalf of the text itself of its social status, function and history, as well as the conditions of its circulation and reception” (196). With the increased exposure of cable television, Collins reveals that critics believe the mass surplus of information channels now devaluate meaning and consistently recycle and revamp original texts so that they take the place of ‘the real’ (194). What the definition of hyperconsciousness exposes is that the recognition of hyperconsciousness is an activity of judgement, made on behalf of the viewer or critic. By suggesting that postmodern texts require judgement of their authenticity in regard to their aesthetics, Collins’ argument likens itself to Immanuel Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgement. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant insisted that aesthetic judgement of an object reveals that beauty is a cognitive function whereby pleasure is not found in the object itself, but in the awareness of one’s mental activity of realizing the object is beautiful (Hughes 13). Furthermore, Kant’s theory also reveals that the self-awareness of one’s feelings does not give way to knowledge about that object: it is only the awareness of the activity of judgement (Hughes 24). What can be gathered from Kant’s philosophy is a rather simple conclusion that judgements of beauty are made based on one’s feelings. However the ambiguity of how exactly individual (and therefore subjective) feelings can be used as a vehicle for determining aesthetics has infiltrated its way into the philosophical assessment of television, perhaps most controversially advocated by Jason Jacobs. In his paper ‘Television, and Infantile Disorder’, Jacobs suggests that in order to avoid disservice to the aesthetic achievements of individual programs, scholars should categorically separate the criteria to judge programs as disparate as Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (1999-2006) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2001), criterions that are ultimately founded on the basis of personal judgement of beauty and aesthetics- (30). Jacobs’ desire for categorisation based on feeling aligns with Kant’s critique of judgement, whereby in order for an object (or artwork) to be considered under aesthetic judgement, it must appear as if beauty were a property of the object (Kirwan 23).
Maron’s exploration of Kantian judgement and the appearance of beauty in an object is dealt with explicitly in the episode ‘Professor of Desire’ (Robert Cohen, 2015). The episode opens with Marc Maron recording his podcast with the novelist Jerry Stahl, where the two debate Stahl’s status as a literary icon in relation to the efforts made by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Phillip Roth. Maron begins its set-up as a hyperconscious program by referencing Roth, which allows viewers to make the connection between the episode’s title ‘Professor of Desire’ as the exact title of Roth’s famous novel published in 1977 (potentially also allowing the viewer to predict the direction of the episode’s narrative). During the interview, Marc discloses that he will be giving a speech for his academic friend Jack Ross’ students the following week. Stahl responds to Marc’s excitement by mumbling that all professors do is “kick around Slavoj Žižek”, where Marc becomes immediately self-conscious and panicky as he does not know whom Žižek is. By establishing a known hyperconscious reference (Roth) and an unknown reference (Žižek), the self-reflexivity of Maron becomes evident. Outwardly, by making the connection to Roth Maron acknowledges itself as a postmodern text that recognizes the function and historical status of historically famous literary texts. However inwardly, Marc’s ignorance of Žižek’s literary status suggests that the show is also self-reflexive in the way that it knowingly exposes the complications of failing to understand hyperconscious references in a postmodern context. Later, when Marc speaks to Ross’ students in the lecture theatre – in between his discussion of the philosophical authenticity of comedians Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor – Marc randomly includes a quote of Žižek’s in order to impress the students. Unbeknownst to Marc, he incorrectly quotes Žižek, only to have a young girl in the audience correct Marc’s use of the quote and to then question its overall relevance to authenticity in comedy. The introduction of the girl’s voice is particular in that it simultaneously calls attention to Maron’s use of Kantian philosophy but also to fulfil the hyperconscious reference to Roth’s novel. When the young girl quotes Žižek correctly, the camera cuts to a close up of Marc’s face, in which we see a lustful glint flicker in his eyes. As he has failed to understand the woman’s reference to Žižek, Marc instead acknowledges how beautiful the young woman appears to him. Through this acknowledgement of the beautiful, Marc’s process of Kantian judgement begins. It is only when Marc hears the woman’s interpretation of the Žižek text that Marc becomes aware of his feelings that he is falling for this girl, because she satisfies the hyperconscious awareness of the Žižek text he knows nothing about. By judging her as beautiful but failing to learn anything further about Žižek by the end of the episode, Marc fulfils Kant’s philosophy. Marc’s inability to learn anything about the Žižek text reveals that he is less concerned with the demands of postmodernist, hyperconscious authenticity. Rather, Marc is satisfied with the traditional Kantian aesthetics of judgement of the beautiful in order to satisfy his thirst for hyperconscious knowledge.
In its final examination of philosophical aesthetics, Maron seeks to aesthetically represent the conflict between authentic and inauthentic judgements of universal taste in regards to Immanuel Kant’s critique. According to Kant, if a person were to declare an object as beautiful then “he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone” (Kant 55). It appears that from Kant’s definition, judgements of aesthetic taste are concerned with putting private considerations of aesthetics forward to a public, where the point of view of one is to be considered as a universal, agreeable opinion of beauty (or art) for all. What Kant’s judgment of aesthetic taste suggests is that “taste is something someone ought to have”, a kind of possessive mental activity to presuppose what the art-object is meant to be (Allison 104). If Kantian taste revolves around the possession of universal taste in beauty, then perhaps what this reveals to us is that such possession gives one the ability to engage with ‘the real’ and therefore some kind of aesthetic truth that is unavailable if one were merely judging objects as beautiful. If we were to apply Kant’s discussion of taste to postmodernism, then it would be appropriate to consider the writings of the postmodernist philosopher Umberto Eco closely. If we firstly consider Eco’s breakdown of the postmodernist developments in television, Eco reveals that viewers have learnt to believe that whoever is speaking directly at the camera is the one who is believed to be telling the truth (Eco 155). However, Eco insists that the only exception to this rule is the comic, where postmodernist television has allowed for comedians to speak directly to the camera to reveal both a joke and truth about themselves simultaneously, ultimately questioning if a viewer of postmodern TV can ever assume that whoever is speaking is actually telling the truth (155). As Newman and Levine suggest, Eco’s discussion of the comic as truth holder often leads into the conversation about the authenticity of television auteurs, where the authorship of a show runner brands the program as a marker for aesthetic truth (42). Despite the legitimacy of such an argument, what is so particular about Maron is that the show uses Marc Maron’s authorship as a marker for the untruthful and the inauthentic in regards to postmodern aesthetic taste, rather than as a marker for aesthetic authenticity. In a final comment about postmodern aesthetics, Eco suggests that what postmodernist art calls for is a breakdown in enjoyability, where it is the technique of parody that allows for the artist to revisit the nostalgia of his past in order to recognise that his past can never be destroyed (Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose: Postmodernism, Irony, The Enjoyable. 73). If Maron seeks to represent Kant’s universal taste aesthetically, then it is useful to point out that Maron searches for a satisfactory standard of beauty by suggesting that the authenticity of Marc Maron’s own taste as a frontrunner is perhaps not as authentic or truthful as other points of view.
Maron’s aesthetic representation of Kantian judgement of taste is most explicit in the episode ‘Ex-Pod’ (Marc Maron, 2015), where Marc finds himself interviewing his ex-wife Michelle on his podcast to promote her new book. The traumatic breakup of Maron’s second marriage is an extensive part of Marc’s persona – not only was his divorce the inspiration behind his stand-up tour Final Engagement (2009) but his loss of self-confidence and bankruptcy scare after the split has been a running joke throughout the three seasons of the show. The complex set-up of Kant’s aesthetics in this episode is due to the fact that Maron presents two contrasting judgements of taste. ‘Ex-Pod’s extensive use of flashbacks from both Marc and Michelle’s perspectives provides aesthetic representation of both positive judgements of taste and negative, ugly representations of taste so that their quarrelling dismantles Marc’s universality of taste within his home. In ‘Ex-Pod’, the flashback montages happen when Marc and Michelle interact with three separate objects in Marc’s house. The dining room table, a toothbrush and a 1960s vintage minimalist chair all provoke Marc and Michelle to reflect on their married life; however it should be noted that the flashbacks each character experience are only made known to the viewer. At no point in ‘Ex-Pod’ do Marc or Michelle confide in each other about their memories or their standards of taste. This technique ultimately reveals that due to the privacy of their aesthetic judgement, neither Marc nor Michelle will ever be able to achieve a shared judgement of agreeable beauty with each other.
The flashback that is of most interest to this discussion is the last, where Michelle’s flashback of the chair differs extremely to Marc’s memory. After stumbling across the object in the living room, Michelle miserably asks Marc “Why would you keep that chair?” to which Marc’s more up-beat reply is “Because I thought I could fix it”. As the scene fades into Michelle’s flashback, a horror scene of Marc and Michelle fighting over Michelle’s physical safety in their marriage begins. The flashback depicts Marc’s physical anger becoming so intense that his action of breaking the chair scares Michelle enough to leave their house in the middle of the night, which sparks the beginning of their separation. Outside of the flashback and in the world of ‘the real’, Marc’s admission of secretly wanting to fix the broken chair makes his positive and universal judgement of aesthetic taste known to both the viewer and Michelle. By articulating out loud his positive taste for the object, Marc engages with Umberto Eco’s assertion that the postmodernist artist revisits his nostalgic memory of his past in order to proclaim his version of taste as superior to others, thereby satisfying Kant’s criteria of taste. When Marc suggests that he could fix the chair, he participates in creating a fantasy of himself in relation to the art object and his abilities, thereby clarifying that Marc’s memory is an inauthentic one due to the fact that it is a dreamy, wishful desire to find beauty in Michelle again. To have a future fantasy about his actions, Marc overrides Michelle’s authentic negative, ugly judgement of taste about the chair because he is avoiding engagement with the real. By putting an end to the possibility that there could be any agreement of universality under Marc’s taste, Maron reveals no positive solution to the Kantian dilemma. However, through the aesthetic representation of differences in taste, Maron reveals to its viewers that the authenticity of memory in relation to an art object will be challenged if the universal understanding of taste cannot be agreed upon between two characters.
To conclude, the analysis of Maron proves that the show aesthetically mirrors scholarly debate of philosophical aesthetics within a postmodernist TV market. By engaging with Adornoian and Kantian dialogues of aesthetics and postmodern theory, Maron presents to its viewers’ various dialogues regarding the authenticity and occasionally self-reflexive awareness of the artificiality of the television medium as an art form. By showcasing its self-reflexivity through TV aesthetics, Maron does not solve the inconsistencies of Kantian or Adornoian philosophy; rather, it presents the theories on screen so that the show’s audience may also engage in the critical philosophical debates.
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Bio: Joanna Elena Batsakis is a PhD student at Monash University, Australia, an is completing a thesis on her favourite artist, Dennis Hopper. Joanna’s main research focus is the intersection of film studies and art history theory. Joanna has recently published “Aficionados Americanos: A Study of Painting and Spanish Bullfighting in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat and Dennis Hopper’s Catchfire at Screening the Past Journal, and an analysis of Robert Mitchum entitled “The Philosophy of Mitchum: Fatal Poet in Where Danger Lives” for Senses of Cinema. In addition to this, she has a forthcoming publication at Celebrity Studies journal entitled “La Bella Figura & The Picasso Complex: From Lost in Translation to Street of Dreams, Scarlett Johansson, the Dolce & Gabbana ambassador.”