From Vancouver, many months late

§§§§

As usual, I've read and thought far less than I should have in the months since I've written, so I have far less to report on that I should.

I have, however, read Of Grammatology for the first time, and tomorrow I'll finish Henry Staten's mostly excellent book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which essentially (and I think rightly) aims to identify something like a deconstructionist method at work in Wittgenstein's writings (he calls Wittgenstein unique among Derrida's predecessors in having developed "a consistently deconstructive standpoint").

I was reading Of Grammatology more just to get a sense of what's in it and get a feel for Derrida's style than to do a detailed and critical reading. The stuff that's most relevant to my thesis are some of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (especially "Signature Event Context," "The Supplement of Copula," and "White Mythology") and Limited Inc. But I figured I really should at some point read Derrida's big book. I still think I should just read "Plato's Pharmacy." I read the first twenty pages before other things took over, but it still strikes me as the most lucid thing of Derrida's that I've read.

Still, it was good fun, even at a skimming pace that didn't allow for much careful rumination. Derrida's a wonderful reader of texts (and the attention he gives to Rousseau reaffirms my sense that I really need to get to know Rousseau a lot better) and I'm often impressed by how convincing his readings are considering how strikingly original they are too. There's a lot to learn from his intense attention to neglected details. I think my other reading in recent weeks has been affected by it (more on that in a bit).

I might as well say a few words about why Derrida's relevant to my thesis, which will also tie into my wanting to pick up the thread of our now long-stale conversation about logic and language. The starting point is Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," which will help me develop a question about the appeal to ordinary language in philosophy, which is whether and how "ordinary language" is supposed to exclude other forms of language. One easy answer to that question is that they're contrasting it with "metaphysical" language, which the heroes of my thesis are trying to expose not as an alternative form of language, but as nonsense, a misfiring attempt to say something that in fact results in saying nothing. But, as Derrida points out, Austin also seems to want to exclude all sorts of other "fictional" discourse, from words spoken on a stage to jokes to recited poems. This all seems innocuous enough within the context of Austin's project, but again, it's part of what's impressive about Derrida, that he can pull on the innocuous side remark and make the whole edifice collapse. To Derrida, Austin's exclusionary gesture is an attempt to retain a totalizing control over the words we utter, to be able to say and mean exactly what we want to say and mean, without risk of infelicity. This is all the more interesting as a line of criticism, since it implies a kind of psychologism--locating meaning in the mind of the intending speaker--that Austin very deliberately criticizes. So if he's at fault here, he's very subtly so.

I could go on at great length about all this. One thing it does for me is to help me distinguish Austin from Wittgenstein around the concept of ordinary language as home. Both Austin and Wittgenstein register sin-inflected expressions of disgust at philosophical language as somehow corrupting us and drawing us away from our ordinary inhabitation of the world and of language. But Austin seems to believe that there's such a thing as a fully satisfactory inhabitation of the world and of language that his appeal to ordinary language is supposed to get us back to. It's this nostalgia for a home that never existed in the first place that I think Derrida is essentially attacking. Wittgenstein, by contrast, also uses this metaphor of the ordinary as home but, I argue, is also aware of the ordinary as fundamentally unstable, not as a place of rest, but as a place of recognition of the impossibility of a place of rest.

In this respect, he shares with Derrida a sense of dynamic play being always at work in the workings of language. This notion of play is what I take to be central to the argument of my thesis. I can only envy Derrida's ability to read texts: his genius consists in large part, I think, of being able to find just the detail that will show that the most totalizing texts are constantly at play despite themselves.

This all ties in only tangentially to some of the stuff you said about logic and language many moons ago. As you know, I think I'm mostly in sympathy with most of what you say, or at least the spirit in which you say it. But I still object to the way you conceive of thought as something we struggle to put into words, and that's often distorted or enhanced or diminished by the effort of being put into words. What I'd suggest--and I draw this largely from Wittgenstein--is that you're working with a conception of thought that doesn't seem to me to be fully coherent. At least, it seems like you're operating with a picture of thoughts as these definite things that exist somewhere in the head, and which then take on a particular form when squeezed out of the mouth. Sort of like feces sitting in the bowels, which then take on the shape of distinctive turds when they come out the anus (I thought you'd appreciate the comparison). I'm not sure we can coherently talk about thoughts without their being linguistic. Or at least, if you ask yourself where this idea comes from, that there are thoughts in the head, it's because we sometimes say things and then claim we'd been thinking about them before and couldn't find words for them, or talk about things being on the tips of our tongues, implying that the thought's there but the words haven't come yet. But these manners of speaking aren't descriptions of thoughts bouncing about in our brains like turds in our bowels. They're just ways of speaking about the ways we speak. Or, to quote from the master:

"The word is on the tip of my tongue." What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behaviour.—"The word is on the tip of my tongue" tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. For the rest the verbal expression does no more than certain wordless behaviour.
James, in writing of this subject, is really trying to say: "What a remarkable experience! The word is not there yet, and yet in a certain sense is there,—or something is there, which cannot grow into anything but this word."—But this is not experience at all. Interpreted as experience it does indeed look odd. As does intention, when it is interpreted as the accompaniment of action; or again, like minus one interpreted as a cardinal number.
The words "It's on the tip of my tongue" are no more the expression of an experience than "Now I know how to go on!"—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word. (Ask yourself: "What would it be like if human beings never found the word that was on the tip of their tongue?")

I'm very tired and running out of steam, so I'll just say a few last things about animals. The first is that I've been reading some interesting stuff, starting with Coeztee's The Lives of Animals, moving on to a short collection of essays called Philosophy and Animal Life, with contributions from Stanley Cavell and (most interesting among them) Cora Diamond that deal with Coetzee's book, and now a book by my supervisor called The Wounded Animal. I won't go on at length here, but will hopefully return to it all sometime soon. Part of what I find fascinating is that the discussion deals on one hand with our relations with animals, and on the other hand with the tension between philosophy and literature and the "difficulty of reality" they both confront. And I don't think the two are just coincidentally related: part of my interest in animals comes from the difficulties they throw up for our own sense of our place in the world and our attempts to make sense of it.

I'm also trying to write a companion piece to Pork. The ultimate plan is to have a trio of short plays called Three Little Pigs, which are Pork, Ham, and Bacon, respectively. One of the things I've been reading is Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland, which is fascinatingly full of contradictions, which Potter herself must have been at least partly conscious of creating (it's in noting these contradictions that I think my recent reading of Derrida has heightened my sensitivity to such things). We have these pigs on a farm who behave for all the world like normal pigs until it's decided that they're too much hassle and are sold off. Pigling Bland then becomes an anthropomorphic pig who has to dress up like a proper young man and go off on his own into the world as young men in such stories so often do. Except he has to go off to the market, and we all know why pigs go to market (there's a similar tension in "This little piggie went to market..." which is all the more odd for the fact that one of the piggies eats roast beef). He even carries a note permitting him to cross county lines, which one would need if one were meat, but not if one were a person. And the story continues along these lines, with Pigling Bland ultimately escaping from the clutches of his (never explicitly named) butchers to start a life of farming potatoes. A Bildungsroman where the animal grows up into humanity. All very strange stuff, especially for a children's story. Though I guess children's stories are always deeply weird.

humour and horror

Well, I've recently handed in a draft of a chapter on Wittgenstein and Heidegger that's been keeping me from focusing on much else besides for the past few weeks. I don't particularly feel like writing about it at the moment, but I'll need to revise it in the next month or so, so you may not end up being completely deprived of that pleasure. I'm also not going to comment on your last (now long ago) post because you sent me the paper it turned into, and I hope I'll find a chance to read it in the next couple of weeks.

Instead I'm going to talk a bit about humour and horror, which is the topic of a paper I'm working at revising right now. I was hoping I could make some changes and then send it off for publication, but as I find almost always happens when I'm revising something--either in academia or creative writing--I tend to just stare blankly for days, grow to hate myself, and then make a few minor fixes and tell myself that I'll make some real improvements on the next sweep through. I'm right at the beginning of that painful process right now, and I thought it might do myself a double favour to type some of the thoughts up here. First, it might help me organise my own thinking on the topic, and second, it might provoke a response in you that helps my own thinking. No pressure, though. I've hardly been doing that kind of service for you.

Anyway, here's the plot, in rough outline. There are various philosophical questions that come up with regard to humour, foremost being the question of what humour is. A search for a satisfactory theory of humour should presumably do two things for us: give us necessary and sufficient conditions that fix what sorts of things are humorous, and also give some sort of explanation of why these things are humorous, tell us what it is about them that provokes this particular response in us.

One of the more promising lines of attack on this front are so-called "incongruity theories" of humour, which define humour as connected in some way to the perception of incongruity. This claim needs refinement in a number of ways: obviously not everything that's incongruous is humorous, and not all humorous things seem to be necessarily incongruous (laughing at someone behaving in a way that's ridiculously typical of them finds humour not in the incongruity of the behaviour but precisely in how closely it fits that person's typical patterns of behaviour). The counter-example that motivates my paper is horror, which also seems to rely on perceptions of incongruity. But I don't want to take this discovery as evidence of just how ludicrously off-the-mark incongruity theories are, but rather take it as evidence of just how close humour and horror are.

Another point that humour and horror have in common is that they can be regarded in many ways as aesthetic phenomena, and be subjected to aesthetic judgment, but unlike most aesthetic phenomena, their success depends on immediate response. I can mull over a painting and declare on reflection that I think it has a marvellously subtle beauty to it, but if I mull over a joke and on reflection declare that it's funny, that's tantamount to saying the joke's failed. Same with horror: if it fails to scare us, it hasn't done its job.

That said, I think horror isn't really about fear anyway (the only other paper I've found on the comparison between humour and horror argues that horror is incongruity plus fear and that humour is incongruity minus the fear). Horror comes from a deeper sense of something being amiss in the universe, or more precisely, something being amiss in our normally stable sense of self. What's scary about zombies chasing us isn't simply the fear that we're going to die, but the fact that the dead have come to life and that people we knew are no longer people and are trying to kill us. The incongruity that's central to horror is an incongruity in our conception of the human: our sanity depends on there being a sharp line between the human and the inhuman, and horror blurs that line.

Another point worth remarking on with both humour and horror is that the incongruities they rely on require a certain aptness. Not just any incongruity is funny because some incongruities are simply weird. If I see three bananas lying on the sidewalk, that's neither humorous nor horrific, but it is incongruous. Humour relies on incongruous twists that strike us as slyly appropriate: jokes about lascivious priests work because, on one hand, priests are supposed to be celibate--hence the incongruity--but on the other hand, we recognise that, in fact, priests are often nothing of the sort. The incongruities in horror tend to rely on a deeply rooted sense of cosmic justice. The Birds, for instance, starts out with the two protagonists flirting in a dangerously cavalier way, with a love bird at the centre of their flirtation. Soon enough, they learn that birds aren't something to be trifled with, the implication being that neither is love. With both humour and horror, the aptness and the incongruity seem to derive from the discovery or recognition that the world is bound to upset our best-laid plans, that our rationality is limited, that we are finite beings. This characterisation might seem a bit grandiose for describing casual jokes and cheap horror flicks, but I think I can answer that by simply saying that they're superficial instances of deep phenomena.

One line of attempting to define humour would be to say that there's some characteristic of humour itself--to say that humour is an entity out there in the world--by which we can identify it and distinguish it from everything else. My counter-example to show that this can't work is black humour, because black humour--it seems to me--can be either humorous or horrific depending on how we look at it. You could say it's a humorous way of reflecting on horror, but there are also circumstances where the humour simply won't be taken up, and what one person might see as grimly comic another might see as simply horrific. (There's a nice story of Kafka reading the first chapter of The Trial to Max Brod, but being unable to finish because he was laughing so hard.)

More broadly speaking, it seems we can find pretty much anything humorous and pretty much anything horrific in the right frames of mind. (This is one sense in which humour and horror seem as much emotional phenomena as aesthetic phenomena). The point is, first of all, that pretty much anything can strike us as incongruous given the right frame of mind--language itself contains the incongruity of random marks corresponding to meanings--so whatever humour and horror are, they aren't things "out there" to be detected independent of our responses to them.

In prying them apart, I want to say it has something to do with the nature of play. Humour is a species of play, whereas horror isn't, or at least isn't straightforwardly so. What play is and how it works is tremendously complicated and intriguing and I don't have enough to say about it right now. But for the moment, take these as characteristics of play: (1) it involves a kind of distancing, or "as if" behaviour, where we don't take what we're playing at as fully seriously; (2) it's bounded in space and time: there's a kind of "play-ground" in which play is acceptable, but there are subtle rules or principles that govern how and where we can play; (3) play involves creatively developing on a theme, whether it's passing a ball toward scoring a goal or building on jokes. I'm sure I could think of other important characteristics. But the important thing for the moment is that humour involves the distancing aspect of play, which horror lacks. Under the aspect of humour, everything seems remote, and as a result, we feel safe. When the world is laughable, we can't be hurt, because under the aspect of play, important things can't be hurt. In the world of cartoons, Coyote can blow himself up as much as he likes but he won't actually be harmed.

In horror, by contrast, I'd suggest that the notion of precariousness of human identity that I wrote about earlier comes from the fact that nothing feels safe anymore. It's not just that there's a monster that's going to get us, but that the universe is fundamentally out of joint. Horror gives us a world in which play isn't possible.

Both of these responses are important, I claim, and both are related to the fact that the actual occupies a vanishingly small space within the realm of the possible. We tend to think of the way things are as fixed and necessary, but what both humour and horror reveal is that things could be radically otherwise. Depending on how we encounter this discovery, we can either have a sense of distance on the actual that makes it seem laughably trivial, or we can respond with a horrific sense of agoraphobia, realising that how things are is by no means safely established.

Shit, I really have to run, so I'm not going to be able to check over this or say anything about the Symposium--not sure I have much of any interest to say anyway--and also I haven't had a chance to think through the fact that some things are clearly funny that aren't horrific. Horror can sometimes be amusing, but aside from the case of black humour, humour is rarely horrific. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because horror only plays on the precariousness of human identity, so there are vast swathes of humour that aren't susceptible to being viewed as horror.

Sorry this was so hasty and such a mess. Not promising for the paper I want to write.

Some responses

So, here’s my first post. You seem to lament that yours wasn’t as good as you’d hoped. I think that’s a good thing. If you’d set the bar too high, both of us would have been afraid to jump in. Without trying to, I expect my first contribution might also have that dubious virtue.

I should hasten to add that I found both your posts quite stimulating, as you’ll infer from the fact that I find a lot in them to respond to. What I’ll do is write two separate posts, one responding to the two you’ve put up so far, and a second one reflecting on a couple of readings I’ve done recently. I figure it makes for more interesting blogging not to use the comments to respond to a post unless the response really is just a few sentences. Anything longer, I think, belongs on the main page.

I share your sentiment about lectures, conferences, and even seminars. I try to attend these things occasionally, because I do find that I’ll get things out of them that I wouldn’t get otherwise, but little enough that I try to minimize the time I spend on them. What I find I get that’s of most benefit is the provocation of something that comes from something entirely external to me: I’ll encounter ideas and forms of reasoning that never would have come to me on my own because I didn’t start or frame the conversation even to the extent that I do when I’m selecting what books to read. It’s a good learning experience to watch intelligent people thinking, especially if they’re quite unlike me.

On the flip side, I have great trouble participating. I think I go slower than most people. In conversation, I can slow things down and get my interlocutor to go at the pace that I need to follow him or her. But even in seminars, I usually timidly assume that the whole seminar shouldn’t slow down for my sake, so I just follow along, pick up as much as I can, and rarely feel on the ball enough to make a contribution of my own.

So one thing I do like about conversation with intimates is that I cease to be a spectator and can actually be carried along in someone’s train of thought. It’s like the difference between watching a car race and sitting in the passenger seat, perhaps even making suggestions and giving directions, and steering every once in a while.

On the topic of lectures, I’m reminded of a remark by Popper, explaining why he chose to use his invitation to speak at the Wittgenstein-dominated Moral Science Club to launch an attack on the Club’s chairman. The one thing, he said, that a lecture can do that a written article can’t, is spark debate, and so he aims to choose the most provocative topics when he gives talks.

I was interested to read about Proust’s disdain for conversation (something you’ve mentioned before), because it seems like conversation is so universally praised by thinkers of all stripes. I’m attracted to people who develop and defend the thought that goes against conventional wisdom, but I’m at least a bit sceptical of Proust’s claim. The scepticism comes from the fact that all language, and not just conversation, is a public phenomenon: we learn language from others, we use language to speak to others, and our words have meanings only to the extent that we can use them to make sense to others. Maybe that puts it a bit too strongly, but only a bit too strongly, I think. When Proust writes, who’s he writing for? The same people he can’t share his private self with in conversation? If anything, the public that buys his books is more of a stranger, less intimate, than those he speaks with. The self that writes has less of a sense of its audience, and so presumably has to find a language that’s less intimate than the language that friends share. Maybe the distance of not having to face your interlocutors allows for greater honesty? At any rate, Proust was clearly influenced by reading books, and wrote them himself, so perhaps the most he should say is that the conversations he prefers are the ones where he gets to control the pace of the conversation, where he never gets interrupted, and where his interlocutor will continue speaking until he chooses to intervene.

On a related note, one of my pet peeves is where thinkers (and this is true of the cleverest) generalize about human experience when really they’re just speaking of their own experience. At least the way you transcribed him, Proust says not just that he becomes more superficial, lazy, etc., in conversation, but that people in general do. How should he know? Maybe he feels that way. What if someone else says that all his best thoughts come from dialogue with others: does Proust really have any basis to claim that this person is lying, or deceived, or simply shallow?

All that said, I think I’m probably assuming too much about Proust, especially since I’m not reading him at first hand. I thought what you said about Socrates was really interesting, that though we often take the dialogues as the prime example of how thought evolves through conversations, Socrates’ thought doesn’t seem to be particularly shaped or shifted by his interlocutors. The one counter-example you gave, that of Diotima, comes as a story Socrates tells of his youth. We don’t see the Socrates of the dialogues being shaken in his views at all.

I was also charmed by the polar bear story. It raises some interesting questions about what we take for granted and what we deem to require evidence. It reminds me of a passage in the Philosophical Investigations, section 52: “If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine those rags very closely to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous. But first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy.”

Gosh, and those are just responses to your first post. Regarding the second, I imagine there’s a fascinating history to be written (or perhaps it’s already been written?) on the ways in which different people at different times have conceived of childhood. Bataille’s association of childhood with evil seems to me to be one side of a dichotomy, the other of which associates childhood with innocence. I think what both of these views pick up on is the sense that children haven’t fully been initiated into our moral world, they don’t yet have a sense of responsibility, which makes them chaotic and unpredictable, but also not subject to the same sanctions as adults.

I was also interested in your suggestion that evil is something transgressive but necessary, like the spooks at Hallowe’en (I know Bakhtin has things to say about this that I haven’t read). Hopefully by summer I’ll be working out in more detail what I want to say about play in my thesis, but I think it has a lot to do with just this: play seems to require a space in which the ordinary rules of conduct are suspended, and this space is both necessary for those ordinary rules to exist, but also has to be bounded in space and time.