“Larry David is Anonymous”: Anonymity in the System

In the second episode of season six of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled “The Anonymous Donor,” Larry David has donated enough money to the National Resources Defense Council to have a wing named after him. There’s a plaque on a wall with his name. At an inaugural party, however, he notices another plaque on another wall: a wing has been donated by Anonymous. This in itself is not a problem; anonymous means anonymous, so is in no competition with him. The problem, though, is that in fact anonymous does not mean anonymous, since his wife happens to know the identity of Anonymous—Larry’s friend, Ted Danson.

Poor Larry. Ted reaps the benefits of two logics: in one he gets to be self-effacing and generous, while in another he gets to be recognized and generous. “You’re either anonymous or you’re not!” Larry protests (when he sees that everybody at the party knows who Anonymous is). But later, after he is stripped of his proper name on the wall by an outraged NRDC board member and made Anonymous instead, he falls victim to his own protest. At the conclusion of the episode, while being chased down the street by some angry men, he stops at the NRDC building and bangs on the door to be let in. “I’m Anonymous,” he screams to a guard. “Larry David is Anonymous.”

The narrative of anonymity is crossed by two other narratives. In one, the perpetrator of a stain of ejaculate found on a bedcover in the David house is wrongfully accused and then subsequently self-identified — until another such stain is discovered on a doll on the bed of the daughter of Larry’s agent. We never learn the perpetrator of this second stain. The agent’s wife accuses Larry. Larry’s wife unintentionally suggests Ted Danson when, speaking of his anonymous charitable “donation,” she explains, “That’s how he likes to do it. It makes him feel better about himself.”

In a second narrative, Larry loses a beloved old New York Yankee jacket at the dry cleaners. The owner shrugs: sometimes you get an item and sometimes you lose one. This becomes “the law of the dry cleaner,” which in fact so outrages Larry that he speaks to a California Senator about it and demands that the government take action. In effect, the “law” merely provides an explanatory gloss on what is in fact a ceaseless cycle of loss and recovery, utterly random in nature. Larry never gets his particular jacket back. It may as well have been utterly dispossessed of his ownership and become anonymous.

The problem with anonymity in each of these narratives is that it won’t stay still. Like the ejaculate of a male, it squirts out; identity itself exercises a stain which must either be identified or else identify itself. Moreover, like an item of clothing at the dry cleaners, anonymity is caught up in a chain of substitution; even the most precious of material things loses its distinctiveness in the play of duplication within a larger category or kind. Finally, the public designation of anonymity on a nameplate cannot ultimately suppress its proper name, which is either mirrored by the proper name of another or else itself begs to be “properly” identified.

Academic life may be laced with anonymity, from the students who evaluate their classes or the faculty who work on tenure and promotion committees to the hiring committees of departments or the individual scholars who read prospective publications for journals and university presses. Moreover, if upwards of 60 percent of all college and university teaching is now done by adjuncts, arguably all of them are effectively anonymous; their names never appear on office doors, departmental directories, or even semester-by-semester course offerings. Significantly, I believe, it is from this area that some recent objection to anonymity itself has surfaced. Otherwise, there has been no significant challenge to the massive structural feature of anonymity in academic life since Stanley Fish’s “No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission,” originally published in PMLA over twenty years...