Elena Kagan’s Face & British Comedy: a Modern Allegory.

Elena Kagan: overloaded signifier.

A friend of mine noted on Facebook last week that present SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan bears more than a passing resemblance to spacky Britcom ubiquity David Mitchell (in girthier times, anyway). I noted that her delectable visage actually seems to have cast in wobbly marble a combination of  Mitchell, Richard Herring and Eddie Izzard. To note this is effortless; but, as another commented asked, “what does it mean?” My contention is that our analysis must take several strands.

We see in her the figure of the Mitchell; the court jester of the pro-war Left; this meeting of Aristophanes and Aaronovitch. And of course this recalls for us Kagan’s stance on the extension of battlefield law and so on.

But when we are then confronted with these Mitchellian facial expressions as a Marxian superstructure atop the base of this Herringean bone structure, we are forced to graft in a new significance to these expressions. (That is to say, we become conscious that Kagan will not merely, in the Kierkegaardian sense, “repeat” Mitchell). Rather, we are forced to articulate an historicist position: Kagan repudiates the anti-pragmatism of Stevens as Herring and his cohorts abandoned the self-conscious leftism of Elton, etc..

Yet this gives us the hope that Kagan will defend those (specifically civil) liberties which are at present most under threat, just as post-alternative comedy has adopted “liberal” positions even as it abandons Eltonite references to a declining brand of labour politics.

Finally, the Izzardian frame in which this interplay occurs reminds us of Kagan’s status as an ‘Other’; an outsider to the juridical community. The absence of any ultimately Real countenance (in the Lacanian sense) forces us to acknowledge that our amateur physiognomy has always as its target the uncompleted Symbolic, and is thus as much an act of Freudian projection as of empircal analysis. Gripping hope & fear in equal measure; we gird ourselves.

The Wispa Duo and the Creme Egg: Self-Parody, Individualism and Negation in Advertising.

Wispa Duo: a question for which there is no easy answer.

So a few days ago I saw my first “Wispa Duo” billboard. This, I think, is an ingenious piece of marketing; perhaps the most playful example of smirking self-parody I have witnessed from a multinational corporation.

The reference point (albeit unspoken) is surely the Cadbury’s campaign for Creme Eggs (“How do You Eat Yours?”) This has, for some years now, been perhaps the most unequivocal celebration of gastronomic creativity on our television screens (and, increasingly, atop our internets); a boundlessly ludic feting of diversity amongst eating styles.

The new Wispa campaign possesses much the same register as the Creme Egg campaign, and has appropriated some of the same techniques (sponsored polls on Facebook, for instance). But, of course, the “choice” present here (between Left bar and Right bar) is no choice at all; these qualities (leftness and rightness) are entirely relational and subjective, and naturally have no bearing upon the experience of consumption (in either sense). But! Cadbury surely intends here to place under the microscope that springtime, fondant-flecked celebration of choice — not only by negating its conferment of autonomy, but by exposing the limits of that conferment. “This choice is no choice at all!” we are expected to squeal. But, of course, the “How do You Eat Yours?” campaign is, on one plane, just as communitarian. In order to be a part of this goo-guzzling orgy of individualism, one must first (under the at least partial coercion of advertisements, etc.) purchase a Creme Egg. In order to experience the apex of free-play in consumption, one must first take one’s part in this highly regulated and specific act of consumption. (Being one of the few seasonal confections, the consumption of the Creme Egg is in this sense especially regulated).

Frederick Taylor: hates caramel fillings.

We might also wonder whether Cadbury’s recent American take-over is salient here. British manufacturing was for a long time regarded by American industrialists as inferior due to its slow pace in adopting Fordist and Taylorist techniques. Here, the encroachment of America onto previously British terrain actuates the most obnoxious act of standardisation imaginable: standardisation which denies that it is standardisation. This is also a national self-parody, and this fact becomes particularly clear if we consider another application of this difficult opposition between “Left” and “Right”.[1] Brits often despair at the narrowness and pusillanimous consensuality of American political discourse (as do, naturally, many Americans). Who better to confirm for us what we had always expected — that the categories “Left” and “Right” are pathetic psychogeometrical swipes at political understanding which act to perpetuate a spurious sense of adversarialism — than America’s largest producer of foodstuffs?

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[1] The colour scheme of the advert seems designed to enable precisely this de-coding for British consumers.