Deconstructing Phil. Is Back; Believe It or Not

In the urban, industrialized northern hemisphere it is winter. The days are cloudy, and short. Darkness—both metaphorical and meteorological—prevails as final exams force the most well-intentioned students into an inescapable abyss of anxiety and incomprehension. In short, the time is perfect for reading Kafka, that fun-loving lawyer who teaches that man cannot know the Law, though the Law knows a man better than himself. Today’s episode of Dr. Phil brought 5 (later 4, when 1 quit) judgmental people into the Dr. Phil house. Unfortunately, Dr. P.’s characterization and theory about what constitutes a judgmental person is, as usual, vapificialess (which is my new portmanteau for vapid, superficial, and some other “random” word such as: useless, meaningless, senseless, or reckless). Kafka, on the other hand, provides an elaborate schema of different meanings and meta-meanings of judgment in his aptly named short story, “The Judgment” (which can be read here, though all citations come from The Complete Stories). The judgmental people in the Dr. P. house all fit into easily stereotyped categories, there was the “chauvinist,” the “anti-social,” “the bitch,” and my two favorites, a poor excuse for an “elitist” and a holier-than-thou Christian Right revivalist who is, according to the Dr. P. show, a “moralist.” Such cliché caricatures of judge-mentality do exist in Kafka’s work, as they do in P.’s. Like so many of P.’s guests, the unseen, but oft talked about friend of Georg, who lives in the distant and alien land of Russia is described as “dissatisfied with his prospects,” “embittered,” and “estranged”(77, 78). Georg, the proto-protagonist, is preoccupied with passively keeping various people in his life (his father, his friend, his fiancé, his friends) separate in easily classifiable groups under his defensive control, again similar to many of the guests. Even confined to the trite and shallow characterization put forward by P of what judgmental means, Georg’s father would take the whole bakery along with the cake. Having come to the decision that his son is a deceitful, bad person (read: actually inhuman), the father takes judgmental action. He purports to have spent years secretly corresponding with Georg’s friend telling him truths Georg was ashamed to admit to gain an advantage and, in turn, reveal these truths to Georg, screaming “till now, you’ve known only about yourself…you have been a devilish human being!” The next line is the key: “And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!” This is interesting because it is, in effect, the most extreme statement and manifestation of Dr. P.’s conception of being judgmental: I don’t like you, I want you to die. At the same time, it shows how trivial and flawed it is. After all, no reasonable person would think, just because someone says they want you to die, you have to, or even should. There’s no judicial-political, economic, or social authority here. The father may carry familial authority, but in modern times that is hardly enough to make such a judgment binding. Except, of course, for the fact that Georg’s last name is Bendemann, German for boundman. This is one of the higher levels of judgment at play, one with deep and far ranging effects, one which, if Dr. P. has any inkling or notion of it, he’s been more preoccupied with showing that he knows how to keep a secret. This does not mean it does not exist on the Dr. P. show; like in Kafka’s work, there are deeper, more insidious examples of ideological interplay at stake in every judgment. While Kafka is quite cognizant of these deeper truths to acts of judgments, focusing about them in the story, to Dr. P. they remain only latent and subtle, if they appear at all. What he does say, though, is that being judgmental is about “get them, before they get you.” In the same show, he said “you are responsible to your own creations, you did this to yourself.” These phrases seem incongruous, if not utterly contradictory. Kafka it seems, rejects the first, or rather subsumes it beneath the second. How does “The Judgment” end? Simply put, in Georg’s suicide. But the fact that it is suicide—one killing one’s self—is very important here. The father suddenly seems to disappear. Kafka writes: “George felt himself urged from the room…he swung himself over” a bridge (87-88). This is Dr. P’s idea that “you are responsible for your own creations,” but all judgments, including those made to get someone “before they get me” are also subject to this ambivalent, Existential test. Slavoj Žižek theorizes this counter-intuitive causality quite well in his essay on another one of Kafka’s notable works, The Trial. He writes:

“The necessary structural illusion which drives people to believe that truth can be found in laws describes precisely the mechanism of transference: transference is this supposition of a Truth, of a Meaning behind the stupid, traumatic, inconsistent fact of the Law. In other words, ‘transference’ names the vicious circle of belief: the reasons why we should believe are persuasive only to those who already believe.” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 38)

Replace Kafka’s sweeping, metaphorical idea of Law with his more specific idea of judgments, and you learn that, to follow any authority’s judgment is, in fact, only to follow one’s own judgment, the pre-existing belief in the authoritativeness. Of course this is true of the judgmental people who fit Dr. P.’s more provincial model, but, more subversively, it is true of everyone. Dr. P. equates a judgmental nature as constantly looking down at people, but one could just as easily say that listening to a judgment, no matter the source, is looking up at someone without any real justification. There seems to be one final form of judge-mentality that even Kafka does not appear to be fully conscious of—forget Dr. P. In his diary entries, Kafka writes of the one night when he wrote “The Judgment” by saying that it came out of his head “like a real birth.” (Diaries, 214). He adds that: “only I have the hand that can reach to the body itself” (Ibid.) At first glance, this seems like the way a visceral, relieved writer would boast of his work. But one needs to remember how closely the story involves not just the father and son relationship, but the importance of spawning something versus causing death, including one’s own. In addition to these ever-present motifs, the story’s famous last sentence, in its original German, carries a deep sexual, progenitive implication that it loses in translation. The “unending stream of traffic” that is going over the bridge is the societal materialization of violent ejaculation, where jouissance, where pain and pleasure, life and death, and authority and belief meet, the source and site of the ultimate judgment.

The Myth of Sisyphil

Tonight’s episode of Dr. Phil brought us back to an episode that first aired 3 or 4 weeks ago. Using the unique medium of the Dr. Phlashback we can refamiliarize ourselves with the episode: “Ken’s got enough money for fancy cars, cruises, and air hockey machines and I’m on welfare” “Keri makes the kids afraid to come visit and lies to the police” “He hits them” “She’s on drugs” “Well, I’m just gonna sit back and let ya’ll work this out.” Apparently Dr. Phil’s strategy didn’t work the first time, but this most recent encounter was equally hostile and ineffective. Dr. Phil summoned all his reproductive futurist gusto and teleological bourgeois might to reminded Ken and Keri that he wanted to “restore order” and “come down on the side of the kids.” Numerous times the bickering between Ken and Keri (with wife and boyfriend respectively) got to the point that Dr. Phil just stopped. Resuming, he always called their interactions “infantile” (which we’ve already discussed elsewhere in some detail) and “absurd.” This should immediately bring to mind Camus’s famous concept of the Absurd, especially since it is best expressed in the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” where he uses the example of the mythical Greek who, as punishment for his wily and deceitful feats, had to push a huge bolder up a hill daily, to watch it roll back down and start over again. Here, there seems to be a little of Sisyphus in syndication. The question is, then, does Dr. Phil’s interpretation of the absurd have anything to do with Camus’s Absurd, and is there, indeed, anything absurd or Absurd about the situation at hand? First, it should be noted, that to Dr. Phil and many laypeople, absurdity is a bad thing, equated strongly with misery, unfairness, and weirdness. To Camus, though, Absurdity is a very normal, ethical, and happy idea. He famously writes: “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” because “happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness.” The core elements of Sisyphus’s (and Camus’s) Absurdity do not seem absurd when viewed through the lens of Dr. Phil and those like him because they do not speak of, or with, the same Absurdity. To Camus, coming face to face with the Absurd is becoming “convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human” whereas to Dr. Phil it might be something like: ceasing to be human (and instead infants, animals, monsters, et cetera). The absurd hero looks at the world and, especially at the height of its absurdity, thinks: “all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems…neither sterile nor futile.” To Dr. Phil (who is not, like Sisyphus, the “wisest and most prudent of mortals) to think of life without order, end, and meaning is a tragic punishment. Thus, we might even say that Dr. Phil does not meet the first criterion of the Absurd hero, that of consciousness. We can say of Sisyphus, but not Dr. Phil: he “knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.” For Dr. Phil—and by extension Ken, Keri, and the whole gang—the Absurd epiphany has not been reached and cannot be built on until there is the realization that objective success is hopeless. The only hope, for Sisyphus and Phil alike, is not to put the rock down, but rather to keep going while consciously embracing, not maligning, the Absurdity inherent within the system. To try and “fix it” is worse than going against the natural order of things or defying the gods because it is to miss out on the possibility that “the lucidity that was to constitute…torture at the same time crowns…victory.” To Camus, life and its Absurdities are worth living again and again. For Dr. Phil, we must consider the possibility that his show is, in a very real way, the locus of many suicides, perhaps chiefly his own.