The Différance that David Makes

…the final section on Seinfeld, despite your obvious fondness for it, is an excrescence that should be lopped off and replaced with a true conclusion.

— Will Pritchard, concerning “Derrida, de Man and the Dunciad: The Scriblerian Deconstruction of Economic Logocentrism” 

 

I have often endeavoured to establish a friendship among all men of genius, and would fain have it done.  They are seldom above three or four contemporaries, and, if they could be united, would drive the world before them. 

—Jonathon Swift to Alexander Pope

September 20, 1723 

In 1989 when Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld worked as stand-up comedians, one was considered successful based on his or her presence on television.  This tradition began with the comedian Andy Griffith’s fictional role in the 1960s; by the 1980s comedians had begun to play “themselves,” such as Rosanne Barr in Rosanne; and Bill Cosby’s rise to the top in the situation comedy The Cosby Show epitomized the path of a successful comedian.  In other words, the “powerful intermediary” that booksellers were in the beginning of the 18^th century is what network television became at the end of the 20^th.  Economic logocentrism is even more widespread in television as a show must prove to be immediately popular–that is to say sufficiently profitable—to even be allowed to be fully presented to the public, that is to have one’s presence fully broadcasted.  An unknown comedian gets a break by turning their identity into a five-minute monologue for The Tonight Show.   It is in this atmosphere that David and Seinfeld were allowed to produce Seinfeld, a situation comedy that masquerades as another clichéd dramatization of a celebrity living in “the real world.”

Seinfeld, like Pope’s poisoning and Dunciad, is construed in (at least) two forms which cannot be completely differentiated from one another: the implied production of the show that puts it on television, and the fictionalized version—Jerry—that the protagonists, “Jerry Seinfeld” and George Costanza, try to produce. Because the comedian-gets-sitcom motif was so tired, dull, and economically logocentric this doubled the  presentation of their story, and the differences and similarities between them, and allows the show to satirize the production industry and the mode of the situation comedy itself.  The moment that Seinfeld and David present their “show about nothing,” i.e. Seinfeld, is Pope’s real-life poisoning of Curll—they accept “the bag of sack” that they assume to be to their benefit—and the moment that “Seinfeld” and Costanza pitch their “show about nothing,” i.e. Jerry, is the “Account” of it.   From there the two are set free to make countless jokes against network television in its prime slots with the consent of NBC, not because the network understood the satiric levels of the show but, because it made them money.

To what extent Seinfeld is “Seinfeld” and what extent David is Costanza is under constant revision in the show, for we assume, at the beginning, that Seinfeld is “Seinfeld,” and that Costanza is a fictional, joking addition, like Scriblerus.  However, as more heavily annotated editions come out we see that David is Costanza more than Seinfeld is “Seinfeld,” for example in the DVDs and their “Notes about Nothing” that describe the real-life material from which David got his ideas.  His later overtly-autobiographical show Curb Your Enthusiasm further demonstrates how much Seinfeld was a satire on David for making Seinfeld, most notably in a scene between David and the actor who played Costanza in which the latter claims his character on Seinfeld could not be considered a respectable, decent human being, and the former looks very uncomfortable by the significance of what is said.  Seinfeld exists with the Dunciad Variorum as “the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself,” and we can never know to what extent the presence of Costanza in one work inscribes the absence of its author, how inscribed Pope is in Scriblerus, or how justified any attack is, be it in print, on television, or with poison.