Are the films of Jerry Lewis "queer"? Concerning art's dependence on an "outside."

Watching Jerry Lewis's brilliant 1963 comedy "The Nutty Professor," I can't help noticing that the film's critique of the American male jock mentality, which is perfectly lucid, is a social criticism the ground of which had shifted a decade later. In my generation, this kind of social criticism, at least in America (where more extreme images of gender identity were constructed and maintained, in contrast to Europe), was associated with gayness. I think it is safe to say in the America of 1963 the more obvious identification associated with the Lewis character in this film and the way he, and Lewis as director, see the society around them, would have been with Jewishness. Though another perspective is also possible, and this accounts for Lewis's popularity among film lovers in France, among other things: people who look awry at the world they live in, including all of its notions of normality, which indeed a broad cultural movement in this time was already criticizing( the beatniks and hippies were a part, and a form, of this), have a tendency to be artists or partial to certain art forms and works and the way the world is represented through and by them. Societies that are in some measure conservative, conformist, or intolerant need categories in which to isolate those people who don't seem to fit the norms. America is of course the society that would at least want and pretend to welcome all the one-time outsiders (provided they abide by the dominant culture's norms). In Europe, it was often thought that the Jews were the one people who could never be assimilated, but in America this happened because the name was honored while traits associated with it could still be disdained and people rejected for them. In America, this was said of other groups, notably the natives and the blacks, and particularly in the latter case, this would remain largely true in some ways, while the contrary, their assimilation to majoritarian values and norms with some marked stylistic differences, was in large measure also true. Thus marking the ambivalence that often attends those who are the object of pressures towards both inclusion and exclusion. Certainly, identity politics only goes so far no matter what the terms.

But Lewis's persona in this and other films was as much a figure of the Jewish pariah as Charlie Chaplin had been earlier, though without Chaplin's identification with the poor. A suitable 50s cultural icon, Lewis's characterizations are closer to Mad Magazine than to the socialism latent in every kind of neorealism.

I still have painful recollections of, while making no effort of any kind to model myself on any figure of social alienation or difference, strangers insinuating that I must be either queer (I'm not exactly) or an unreal comic character like Woody Allen (for whose silly persona in the films that defined it I have never much admired).

One thing I find particularly curious is that American society is so rooted in identity politics that people normally think, I learned, that if someone points to you as a social deviant with deviance property X, they are in the wrong if and only if you do not possess property X, which implies that they are in the right if you do.

We now have laws and norms that protect everyone from being the object of disdain because of their social category. This does not solve the underlying problem, which is the obsessive normality and normalization. All it does is change the terms.

The last century saw the ultimate regime of normality and normalization: Nazism. The logic behind the concentration camps is not well understood. Most people believe that people were sent to the camps and/or murdered because their identity was not welcomed. People were prejudiced against Jews. So what Nazi Germany and maybe all of Europe needed was something like the American Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League. (And the Jews needed their own country and state.). What happened with the Jews is that they were officially normalized. It is now a normal identity, and qua normal, it has little or no essential meaning. The ADL and those who think like them believe that it can have none, because then it would be used as a prejudice. The underlying idea is that prejudices are false opinions that suppose that members of a social group possess any characteristic traits whatsoever. Thus, the category that names them has a referent but no sense or meaning in the terms of Fregean analytical philosophy (where a word has a referent that it designates and a "sense" that gives a meaning by ascribing properties, so that, in general, common nouns have both and proper names, like the Name itself in Judaism, the Name of God, have only designation as they do not designate the things they do by virtue of any set of properties but only by arbitrary correlation of name and thing).

Normality, along with universality and the construction of the modern nation-state whose culture was to be rooted in the national language, was as much a characteristic obsession of the modern bourgeoisie as the problematic individual whose heterogeneous experience was normality’s other face. Socialism was not immune to the problems of modern bourgeois society because it was a form of it. This normality had multiple fault lines. The peculiarly American way of constituting national universality as a sum of strongly articulated particularities does not solve the problems revealed by these fault lines so much as it gives them a unique expression. A post-capitalist society might have other concerns. The only trouble today is that there is no clear image available of a world that is no longer capitalist. Notably, we still have the oppositional pairing of the managed subjected laboring and indebted self and the expressively creative artist as hero.

Comedy as well as tragedy depend on the unassimilable character of the individual hero or antihero to the social world he or she is part of. The totalitarian logic of normalization, now most fully expressed in our mental health system and its medical judgments (heretofore most fully articulated in, again, Nazism), tends to abolish the meaningful character of experience (which is as much as anything what the Nazi camps aimed to deny and destroy), spells the end, if not of all art, of the tragic and comic figurations of experience.

The right seeks to abolish experiences of social alienation and disaffection, the left to multiply and generalize them.

The logic of identity politics is inclusion. Its uses of the concept of oppression are generally misleading, in large part because it is not injustice that is targeted but disaffection. This leads in two directions: towards a logic of segregation and representation, by way of minority group claims that its members are oppressed because of their identity, in other words, that oppression is really marginalization; and medical/therapeutic normalization.

If "Jewish" and other perspectives on the mainstream society and what is wrong with it are either disappearing, losing their claim to entitlement (at least in the name of identities), it is for the same reason that tragic, comic, and novelistic expressions of social alienation have been losing ground in favor of a media culture of instantaneous and transparent public discourse.

The strategy is the one that lie at the basis of the camps: first, identify the otherness within, that which is included as excluded; then, to destroy it as such, aiming to produce a "flat" social order with no outside.

Misread, Lewis's films could suffer a fate similar to what Charlie Chaplin's films would if similarly read. They would lose all their meaning and importance if his typical opposition between the tramp and the cop is read as "Jewish," so that the outsider perspective is mapped onto the outsider identity that legitimates it, instead of the latter being significant only in the way it opens onto the former. Identity politics is based on a logic normalization that it affirms.

Thus and for precisely the same reason, the films of Lewis lose all their meaning if his character is a misfit because of the social identity that might as well be on his official identity card. That is a measure of their continuing power.

The best hope may be that one that is revealed once there are no outsiders inside the social totality, in a perfectly transparent if ethically vapid media democracy, in which since everything can be and is said, just as, with the aid of algorithms, the media and police (and marketing) logic according to which any link or connection that can be posited must be and is true (sellers of commodities need only the simple syntax of being interested in the commodity enough to want to "have" it, while the police need only to know that a suspect has "connections" to whatever is outlawed), since it can be posited and validated, as there is no logical principle of validation other than the posited association.... Once this has been achieved, there will be no unsaid sayable statements. In that case, there will be no art, just business, government, therapeutic practices, and policing. The hope is revealed by the increasing interest in the contemporary world in art in its various forms. It cultivates and depends upon disconnection and disaffection. It cultivates unsaid sayables and then presents them. It relies on a logic according to which, as we know in mathematical logic since Gödel, there is no possible complete social system or language. There will always be chaos threatening every cosmos. The place of art is the placeholder of the guarantee of this.

Buy the end of the 60s, the decline of credibility facing Marxism in most if not all of its forms motivated various attempts to posit some social group other than the famous proletariat as the natural bearer of avant-garde and revolutionary hopes. This contributed to “intersectionality” in its various forms, from political philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow coalition” of the marginalized groups that were “oppressed” (the idea being to have a government that would represent all and only those people who were oppressed, excluding only those “privileged” people who did not have chips marked “oppressed” to redeem in return for participation in legitimate social power). This new social subject could be blacks, people of color generally, women, gays, etc. It was a displacement that repeated some earlier ones. One occurred when Marx, disdaining the German Jews (ignoring the very different state of their Eastern European coreligionists) for being concerned only with money, nominated the new urban industrial working class as the subject of history’s final accomplishment of universality without oppression. This was meant to replace the bourgeoisie of the French Revolution. (Though in fact under socialism the class that took power was the professional and managerial class, destined to also become the ruling class under capitalism, where it existed in competition and overlap of interests with the traditional capitalist class.) It in turn gave political form to older ideas that had emerged in the medieval and early modern periods in the form of the utopian, messianic, and millenarian religious movements which in the guise of Protestantism played a role in the English Revolution. All of that in turn was a displacement of the earlier displacement that occurred with the origins and rise of Christianity, which gave a universalistic interpretation to certain ideas in Judaism. But Judaism as such only ever maintained the vaguest of ties to any broad revolutionary social project, in part because the Jewish people were always and by definition a minority. In the end, the question of the subject of revolutionary or avant-garde social and political processes may just be whoever is involved in them. The “left” traditionally was an alliance of intellectuals and the poor. The broad avant-garde today that exists, if one can be said to, largely in the worlds of art and theory may require as its basis nothing except what is intrinsic to what they do. Which would be whatever motivates social disaffection and drives some people to creative expressions of discontent.