A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!

by Simon J. Evnine

A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is an entirely original kind of work. It takes the form of commentaries on memes made with the image of Batman slapping Robin. The commentaries are written as if they were not authored by the same person who made the memes, allowing the author to consider himself and his work from the outside. The book defies genre by mixing discussions of philosophy, psychoanalysis, Judaism, language, and representation with self-writing and autotheory. These are juxtaposed like the items in a cabinet of curiosities or topics in an analytic patient’s free association. Both pre-modern and post-modern in its inspiration, it is cerebral, playful, social, and intensely personal. It contains philosophy, including original philosophical research, but also explores new ways of doing and thinking about philosophy.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

306 pages, Paperback

Published December 28, 2022

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy they do not know how to fulfil, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic.”
― Andrea Nye

“This rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.”
― William Shakespeare

“Philosophy is the disease for which it should be the cure, but isn't.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, or possibly Herbert Feigl

The first of the above quotes occurs more than once in this unusual book; the others don't, but they kept suggesting themselves to me while I was reading it. But let's back up for a moment. What is this thing?

The uncontroversial part is that there are a lot of pictures of Batman slapping Robin, and that philosophy, psychoanalysis and Judaism play important roles in the lengthy commentaries which accompany the pictures. One conceivable explanation is that there's nothing more to it. The book could be an elaborate joke, with the point being that there is no point, or perhaps a point that you manufacture for yourself by a process of free association: as it were, the Rorschach inkblot approach to interpretation. Indeed, free association gets an early mention, and as you will see from my reading updates I couldn't resist playing this game too. But you will already have guessed from my opening remarks that I have other ideas in mind.

Although that's far from being the whole story, it seems to me that what the book is really about is the author's changed attitude to analytical philosophy. The commentary circles around, touching many different themes, but it keeps coming back to a central point: there's something deeply unsatisfying with this odd way of using language that exclusively prioritises a quality it calls precision, but which many other people see as obfuscation, or the exercise of power, or simply the wilful avoidance of what's actually important in life. By forcing his thoughts out of their usual channels with the Batman Meme Game, the author has gradually come to see that the feminist critique of logic expressed by the passage from Andrea Nye, which he says he once mocked, actually has a good deal of truth to it. Logic isn't what some white male philosophers want it to be. Philosophy should not just be about absolute truths, whatever they are, but at least as much about lived experience.

I have a great deal of sympathy for this way of looking at things, having spent a large part of my life in another corner of the Kafkaesque Castle of Analytical Philosophy. When I started doing AI and computational linguistics in the 80s, it was all about logic and inference. Many people, myself included, viewed what we were doing as a way of turning analytical philosophy into software. I read a considerable amount of that literature and thought we were creating something great and noble. But it was an illusion. Although logic is extremely interesting and can do some remarkable things, it's not what our minds run on: they run mostly on associations and desires. AI, as everyone now knows, has moved almost entirely towards seeing things in terms of associations and desires, the latest and most impressive manifestation of this tendency being ChatGPT. People who don't like it call it a stochastic parrot, but if it is then it's a stochastic parrot that can discuss philosophy in an interesting way. Logic based AIs have never even come close to doing this.

Incredibly, ChatGPT turned out not only to know about the Batman Meme Project but was even happy to compose homage memes of its own:



Sometimes I despair of the state of the world. But when you see an AI make a rude and witty pun about a ground-breaking philosophy project, can things be completely hopeless?

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a look at the above image. What did Robin say to prompt Batman to slap him? Or, just maybe, it was something Robin did to provoke Batman's violence. The possibilities are endless.

Actually, in Simon J. Evnine's book, we're given more than four dozen variations on this cartoon frame, with all sorts of interesting captions/additional wording/image modifications. Interested? I hope so since Simon underscores how a reader should have FUN. That certainly was my experience. And I say this as a non-specialist in philosophy, psychoanalysis or Judaism (more below on this point).

First off, let's take a look at the book's title page:

A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! Volume One Edited by Simon J. Evnine

You gotta love how Simon injects elements of humor. Volume One is over 300 pages! Obviously his subject is so rich it can be expanded to more volumes. Hey, why not? Also, indicating he's the editor rather than the author, although he wrote the entire work, start to finish. And ending with an exclamation point to emphasize the dynamism of the book. Sidebar: throughout the book Simon speaks of himself in the third-person.

By the way, two dictionary definitions are in order:

Meme - an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations

Parerga - a piece of work that is supplementary to or a byproduct of a larger work

Got that? Well, in the spirit of accommodating a reader, Simon made four short videos addressing his vision for the book. Here's a quick summation:

The book, so Simon informs us, consists of commentaries of memes he made with the image of Batman slapping Robin, written as if by an editor who is distinct from the maker of the memes. These commentaries are about, among other things, philosophy, psychoanalysis and Judaism.

Overall, the book is a work of philosophy, both premodern and postmodern in inspiration. His book does not have a unified voice, is not about anything in particular, does not take a position on any controlling idea nor does it have a thesis.

However, Simon insists, it is a work of philosophy since it has philosophy in it – an exposition of interesting ideas for the non-specialist (people like me) along with the development of original ideas. All materials have been generated in the form of presentations, blogs and videos. The book investigates what are the boundaries of a work and how fragments can compose a work without ceasing to be fragments. The book challenges what we can expect from philosophy; the book is a work OF but NOT ABOUT metaphilosophy. Lastly, two aspects deserve their own call out:

Autotheory – This links discussions of impersonal topics with events and feelings in Simon's own life. For example, a lot of the book is about the emotion of shame, some in the form of an interaction with moral psychologists who write on the subject. But shame is an emotion that has dominated Simon's life and moments of Simon's shame crop up throughout the book. The image of Batman slapping Robin is intimately connected to shame. But Simon has felt very ambivalent about appropriating the concept of autotheory in light of how autotheory has been employed by minority groups toward institutions that have been oppressive to them.

Psychoanalysis - The writing of Simon's book about memes and what surrounds memes took place during his own sessions of psychoanalysis. Thus the image of Batman slapping Robin became intertwined with his very personal experience of psychoanalysis, an image that was deep in Simon's psyche and came to occupy a larger place in Simon's own internal sadomasochism – his older self vs. his younger self. Additionally, Simon wanted to describe what it is like to be in analysis. The book contains instances of free association, something that has been very hard for Simon in his undergoing psychoanalysis but seemed to come easily in his writing the book. Finally, we have what Simon terms “paratext”. It wasn't easy for Simon to distinguish what was the book and what was supplementary to the book. One of the tasks of analysis is to deal with and manage intrusions of reality into the fantasized space of the analysis.

I could cite dozens of quotes from the book that I found fascinating and prompted my own philosophic reflections. But since I'm writing a book review and not a book, I'll share just one in the hope that you'll give Simon's book a whirl:

“Clear writing, too, is aggressive and sadistic - not in its content but in the domination it attempts. The reader is ‘forced’ to look here and not there (where their own phantasies might take them), to disregard this but to give that a lot of weight, to understand something polysemous in one way and not another."

Hmm. This give me pause since I attempt to be clear when I write. Am I being aggressive and sadistic in any way? I wonder. But one thing appears certain - a meme or image can be aggressive in its forcing a viewer/reader to one definite interpretation. Take the below image as an example. Since we are viewing comic book characters, how much latitude does a viewer have for interpretation? And the words in the captions are rather one-pointed and aggressive. Any thoughts?

Thanks, Simon!




British author/scholar Simon J. Evnine, currently a philosophy professor at the University of Miami in Florida

[Simon]

Well, I see that Simon J. Evnine has finally got around to producing an edition of my Batman Meme Project. But no doubt in his unseemly haste to hear the applause of readers, he has only done half the job! When, and whether, there will be a volume II is anyone's guess. I wouldn't bet on its appearance.

The edition itself is not unhandsome, especially in the more expensive hardback edition with its heavier, glossier paper. In order to avoid copyright problems in using an image probably owned by DC Comics, he has altered the images in my original memes quite a lot but this has, I have to admit, actually made the work more visually interesting. So that was a felix culpa.

As for his commentaries on them, oh my goodness! While funny, erudite, and vulgar in almost equal measure, they are often, at best, only tangentially related to the memes themselves. So much so that this is more his book than mine!

Still, I recommend this, at least until a more serious edition is made of my Batman Meme Project, perhaps by some other editor.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I know the author and have been part of this book’s journey for several years now, contributing to it with some graphic and design advice.

That said, I’d like to offer a review from the POV of a layperson who is not at all learned in the variety of topics it covers: from Judaism, to psychoanalysis, to the philosophy of language, to memes themselves. Let me assure you, you don’t have to be to enjoy A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!.

What is most enjoyable to me is the accessibility of this work, and how that accessibility circles around some of its main themes and indeed – per the title – actually CREATES the work as you are reading it.

This concept of the “parerga” – a word I had to look up (singular, parergon: something supplementary to a work (ergon) of art; an embellishment to it; a framing element) and thank you to the book's website for that definition – is integral to what this work is and offers a key to engaging with it. Something “supplementary” is “integral” to the work – there’s just one piece of its cleverness showing up.

The book started as a series of memes posted on Facebook, by a creator who is purportedly different than the editor, Simon Evnine. Editor Evnine discussed the memes in a series of blog posts, offering revelations about them that are, by turns, personal, profound, philosophical, hilarious, and freewheelingly creative. I am probably not using the correct term to describe this, but hermeneutical springs to mind.

The memes became blog posts, became videos, became philosophy, became art, and eventually (but not finally - this is Volume I), became this book. All of these forms and, yes, parerga, are their own thing and also part of a bigger thing: they are in conversation with each other and become much more than the sum of the original parts, and they are also generating ADDITIONAL parerga, as the book makes its way into the world (see, for example, this comment thread where ChatGPT gets involved!).

And I realize I still haven’t described how the work is accessible: first, Evnine’s writing style is always clear and engaging; never bogged down in tortured academic writing, jargon, or concepts that are (too far) beyond the lay reader’s grasp. He even has a commentary on a meme around this specific thing (see M.10 SEEK SIMPLICITY). There is no thesis that constrains the reader to a linear approach to the text; the reader can dip in and out, sample this and that, follow her fancy in any order and any way she likes. Evnine has likened the work to a cabinet of curiosities, and this metaphor seems apt as not only a description but a suggestion as to how to approach the work.

This way of reading again feeds the way the work feels like it is being constructed in real time, by the new and idiosyncratic connections that the reader is making, which are comprised of the connections between the memes and commentaries themselves as they resonate with each other in random order and become something unique.

It is worthwhile to note here, as well, that the whole damn thing feels delightfully like a free association exercise – this, too, ricocheting off one of its predominant themes (psychoanalysis) and an area of content that is explored directly.

Bottom line, this book is capital F Fun – from the simplest enjoyment of the memes themselves, right through to the multi-layered, wide-ranging content, to the ultimate form it takes and the meta-experience of reading it.

Highly recommended.