ThRu- The Company of Humour

THE COMPANY OF HUMOUR

Christophe Van Eecke

Alexander Kluge: Wo liegt die Seele?

Christoph Schlingensief: Ich habe sie hier [points to his chest] jetzt gerade gespürt bei der Frage...

Kluge: Im Atem, ja?

Schlingensief: Ja, sie liegt hier, glaube ich, wo der Pförtner ist.

Kluge: Also etwas oberhalb des Zwergfells.

Schlingensief: Und das gehorcht niemandem.

Kluge: In der Nähe des Zwergfells und bewegt vom Atem, ja? Deshalb ist die Seele so sehr mit dem Lachen verbunden. Und mit der Freiheit. Und mit der Liebe.

Schlingensief: Und mit dem Glück.

(Gaensheimer 2011: 180)

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What is humour? The question has troubled philosophers for many centuries. Comedy probably comes first to mind when we think about humour. After all, things that are said to be humorous are things that we expect to laugh about. At the beginning of the Poetics Aristotle discusses the origins of the word “Comedy”, an art form which both the Dorians and the Megarians claimed to have discovered. They argued that the word itself was derived from comae, which is ‘their word for the outlying hamlets, [...] thus assuming that comedians got the name [...] but from their strolling from hamlet to hamlet, lack of appreciation keeping them out of the city’ (1448a29-1448b1). So we meet comedy in philosophy as an errant practice, a train of performers moving from town to town. This brings to mind Desiderius Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1509). In this famous satire the figure of Folly is followed by a company (or household) of vices: Drunkenness, Ignorance, Self-Love, Flattery, Forgetfulness, Idleness, Pleasure, Madness, Sensuality, Revelry, and Sound Sleep (Erasmus 1993: 17-18). Following Folly’s example and Aristotle’s suggestion that comedy seems to be constantly moving about, this essay will explore humour in a series of interconnected discussions that follow in the train of a central concept of humour. Our point of departure will be Susanne K. Langer’s discussion of comedy in her theory of aesthetics.

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Comedic Form

them as they come along. In this, comedy differs fundamentally from the tragic rhythm, which is much more linear in structure. Tragedy is born from man’s sense of ‘individual history as a passage from birth to death. [...]

Youth, maturity, and age are not merely states in which a creature may happen to be, but are stages through which persons must pass. Life is a voyage, and at the end of it is death’ (FF 332). There is an element of fatalism in the tragic outlook. In Greek tragedy this is made clear through the workings of Fate, which cannot be evaded. When Oedipus learns that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he flees his home town; only to end up in Thebes, where he kills his father and marries his mother. His Fate is foretold and inescapable. ‘Destiny viewed in this way, as a future shaped essentially in advance and only incidentally by chance happenings, is Fate [...]. Tragedy is the image of Fate, as comedy is of Fortune. Their basic structures are different; comedy is essentially contingent, episodic, and ethnic; it expresses the continuous balance of sheer vitality that belongs to society and is exemplified in each individual; tragedy is a fulfillment, and its form therefore is closed, final and passional’ (FF 333-334). Comedy is always ‘episodic, restoring a lost balance, and implying a new future’ (FF 335).

This analysis sheds an interesting light on the origin of the word comedy as we found it in Aristotle. Langer argues that ‘comedy is an art form that arises naturally wherever people are gathered to celebrate life, in spring festivals, triumphs, birthdays, weddings, or initiations. For it expresses the elementary strains and resolutions of animate nature, the

In Feeling and Form (1953; henceforth FF) Susanne K. Langer argues that ‘the pure sense of life is the underlying feeling of comedy’ (FF 327). She explains this by pointing to the biological roots of human life. All life is rhythmic. It is determined by ‘conditioned and conditioning organic processes’. Whenever the rhythm of life is disturbed, ‘the organism as a whole is out of balance’ (FF 328). Life is the continual process of these biological rhythms, their upheaval, and man’s attempts to restore their balance. For Langer, ‘human lifefeeling is the essence of comedy. [...]

The illusion of life which the comic poet creates is the oncoming future fraught with dangers and opportunities, that is, with physical or social events occurring by chance and building up the coincidences with which individuals cope according to their lights. This ineluctable future [...] is Fortune. Destiny in the guise of Fortune is the fabric of comedy; it is developed by comic action, which is the upset and recovery of the protagonist’s equilibrium’ (FF 331). In comedy, the protagonists are seen facing the problems of life, dealing with them, triumphing over them, and moving on to the next challenge. This process is never-ending, unless death intervenes. Comedy rests on the idea that what befalls us is never final, that we can challenge Fortune, or at least overcome it. This means that comedy is structured episodically towards an open future: the sequence of events is potentially infinite and we deal with 4

animal drives that persist even in human nature [...]; it is an image of human vitality holding its own in the world amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence. [...] What justifies the term “Comedy” is not that the ancient ritual procession, the Comus, honouring the god of that name, was the source of this great art form [...] but that the comus was a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility god, a symbol of perpetual rebirth, eternal life’ (FF 331).

Linking comedy to the cycle of life, as Langer does here, generates a shift in the way we usually think about comedy, for it suggests that we might stop considering comedy from the point of view of what is funny or what makes us laugh. To be sure, expressions of vital force will often trigger laughter, but not necessarily because the events portrayed are funny. What makes us laugh or smile is often simply related to the pleasurable feeling that we are witnessing (an artistic form that is vitally expressive of) the basic rhythms of life. It is for this reason that entirely unfunny things such as a sunrise, a baby’s laughter, or a flower in the field can make us smile: in smiling, we acknowledge life.

A second important feature of comedy is its episodic nature. ‘Because the comic rhythm is that of vital continuity, the protagonists do not change in the course of the play, as they normally do in tragedy. In the latter there is development, in the former developments’ (FF 335). This is a crucial point because it illuminates one of the main features of a popular form of contemporary comedy: the sitcom. Comedy series do not follow their protagonists on their road from birth to death. Every episode seems to stand on its own, in a narrative

vacuum, and although the characters might undergo changes in the series these never radically alter the characters’ personalities or relationships. Within the frame of each episode, the characters are defined by certain traits and features that remain constant throughout the series and which provide the basic form of their actions, their reactions, their speech, and the way they will generally behave. In short, these are their wits, by which they address and try to resolve the specific problems that Fortune heaps upon them in any given episode. Similarly, the repetition of certain gags, the fact that we know almost beforehand how a certain character will respond to a certain situation or remark, does not prevent us from finding the events funny and laughing at them. What is pleasurable about such situations is partly the sheer fact of repetition and recognisability. It is typical of episodic comedy that the characters ‘undergo no real agon, no great moral struggle or conflict of passions. Their morality (however extraordinary) is perfect, their principles clear and coherent, and the action derives from the changes of fortune that they meet’ (FF 337).

Interestingly, Langer makes this last observation in the context of a discussion of the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, which she claims are really comedies because the characters do not experience ‘the growth and full realisation of a personality’ in the course of the play (FF 336). They are fully present from the beginning, ‘godlike in their rationality,’ which leaves no room for development.

‘Fortune can bring sad or happy occasions, [but] there is no question of how the heroes will meet circumstances; they will meet them 5

rationally’ (FF 337). Sitcom series offer a variation on this structure: we know what the characters are like, their personalities are constant, it is only the circumstances that change from episode to episode. And in the end, the characters always triumph over circumstance because that is the comic rhythm of life.

A similar approach to comedy can be found in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957; henceforth AC). Frye’s discussion also starts with the Poetics and takes as its point of reference Aristotle’s remark that in some fiction ‘the characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others on the same level’ (AC 33). Frye warns against a moralistic reading of this passage because ‘Aristotle’s words for good and bad [...] are spoudaios and phaulos, which have a figurative sense of weighty and light. [...] Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same’ (ibid.).

In comedy the hero is ‘superior neither to other men nor to his environment’ and therefore the hero, being of roughly the same powers as we, ‘is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity’ (AC 34). Another way of putting this would be to say that in comic fiction the hero is incorporated into society: he lives in the shared human world, among his equals. Frye’s analysis of the structure of comedy contains several other elements that shed further light on Langer’s discussion. For instance, the fact that characters in comedy often undergo little psychological development returns in Frye’s observation that the character of the hero of comedy is often left undeveloped.

‘What normally

happens,’ Frye argues, ‘is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will. In this simple pattern there are several complex elements. In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognises them as usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallise around the hero, and the moment when this crystallisation occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic discovery’ (AC 163). This resolution often turns on the revelation of unsuspected identities, with antagonistic characters revealed to be father and son, or the hero and heroine turning out not to be brother and sister after all, so they may marry and live happily ever after. ‘The obstacles to the hero’s desire, then, form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution’ (AC 164), which recalls Langer’s discussion of comedy as a genre in which characters live by their wits to overcome adversity. Frye argues that this structure of comedy ‘is one reason why the character of the successful hero is so often left undeveloped: his real life begins at the end of the play, and we have to believe him to be a potentially more interesting character than he appears to be’ (AC 169).

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Humour’s Humours

depression spasmodically, so that it causes explosive laughter, sometimes alternating with sobs and tears’ (FF 340-341).

Langer was not the first to discuss laughter as a physiological phenomenon. In fact, Immanuel Kant spends several pages discussing laughter in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1791). He claims that laughter is an affect that emerges when a feeling of tense expectation resolves into nothing (‘Das Lachen ist ein Affekt aus der plötzlichen Verwandlung einer gespannten Erwartung in nichts’; KdU §54, B225).

For Kant, we do not laugh because we experience a sense of superiority over other people or things, but because ‘our tense expectations suddenly come to nothing’ (‘unsere Erwartung war gespannt und verschwindet plötzlich in nichts’; ibid.). We might say that it is an outburst of surplus energy that was building up in expectation of release and was left with nowhere to go because the release never came.

Exploring this suggestion, Kant takes us on a guided tour of the human intestines to explain the physiology of laughter. ‘If we suppose,’ Kant argues, ‘that a movement of the organs of the body is immediately harmonically connected to all our thoughts, it is easy to see how that sudden shift of the mind from one to the other point of view to consider its object could correspond to a mutual tension and release in the elastic parts of our intestines (similar to the one ticklish people experience), which is communicated to the diaphragm: during which the lungs express the air in a quick succession of puffs and so effect a movement that is beneficial to our health. This, and not what happens in the mind, is the only and actual source of the enjoyment derived from a

If we expect anything from comedy, it is for it to be funny and make us laugh.

We already know that there is something wrong with this logic. The error, however, does not lie in associating comedy with laughter, but in associating either of them with what is funny. Langer argues that ‘there is a close relation between humour and the “sense of life,” and several people have tried to analyse it in order to find the basis of that characteristically human function, laughter; the chief weakness in their attempts has been, I think, that they have all started with the question: What sort of thing makes us laugh?’

She refers to Marcel Pagnol’s claim that laughter always ‘betokens a sudden sense of superiority,’ as when we laugh at people who do something stupid or behave clumsily (FF 339).

However, ‘what is laughable does not explain the nature of laughter, any more than what is rational explains the nature of reason. The ultimate source of laughter is physiological [...].

Laughter, or the tendency to laugh [...] seems to arise from a surge of vital feeling. [...] Laughter is not a simple overt act, as the single word suggests; it is the spectacular end of a complex process’ and ‘a culmination of feeling’.

In the case of black humour or gallows humour, which is ‘the harsh laugh in distress,’ the vital feeling we experience ‘is simply a flash of selfassertion. Something similar probably causes the mirthless laughter of hysterics: in the disorganised response of a hysterical person, the sense of vitality breaks through fear and 7

thought that is essentially meaningless’ (KdU §54, B227-228). So our enjoyment does not derive from the content of what we experience as funny, but it is an effect of a physiological process that is occasioned by a feeling, expectation, or, generally, a thought coming to naught. There is something counterintuitive about this argument because Kant seems to presuppose that laughter is not the expression of enjoyment but the source of it. We laugh not because we think something is funny but because our lungs contract; and the experience of this contraction is pleasurable because it is healthy. And its is healthy because it discharges surplus energy that has nowhere to go because some expectation or thought has come to naught. This means that laughter, and the pleasure it occasions, is not at all connected to something being funny in content. In fact, the experience of an expectation coming to naught is not at all pleasurable to the mind. It only occasions a sense of enjoyment in an indirect way, through its effect on the body, where it restores ‘the equilibrium of vital forces in the body’ (‘ein Gleichgewicht der Lebenskräfte im Körper’; KdU §54, B226).

Although Kant’s physiological explanation of laughter seems to get its logic backwards (Kant seems to claim that a sense of enjoyment is the effect of laughter, whereas we would logically expect that we laugh because something is enjoyable) his suggestion that laughter, and its healthy effects, is related to the equilibrium of vital forces does point to an important tradition in the history of humour. In fact, the word “humour” itself is physiological in origin. To see this, we must look back to the beginnings of western medicine and to Empedocles’

natural philosophy. Most early Greek philosophers before Socrates were concerned with a form of natural philosophy that sought the basic element of the physical universe.

Empedocles claimed that all matter consisted of combinations of four basic elements: fire, water, air, and earth.

These four elements also combined the qualities of hot and cold, and dry and moist: fire was hot and dry; water was cold and moist; air was hot and moist; earth was cold and dry. In the medical work of Hippocrates and his circle ‘the four essentials of life became the four humours, which were blood (hot/moist), black bile (cold/dry), yellow bile (hot/dry) and phlegm (cold/moist). Illness occurred when an external cause upset the balance of the humours’ (Hart 2001: 720). The body would react to this imbalance by mixing the elements to establish a new balance between the four humours.

This process was called “coction” and generated a number of symptoms that signalled the expulsion of the remaining excess of one or the other humour, such as fever, sweating, urination, defecation, and vomiting.

The growth of a boil or an abscess was another way for the organism to rid itself of superfluous fluids. The basic principle is explained in the Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of Man: ‘The human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.

These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated

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in the body and not mixed with the others’ (in Lindberg 1992: 116).

The Hippocratic texts also connected the four humours to the ages of man and to the four seasons. Every season ‘was characterised by a corresponding prevalence of one of the four humours and, therefore, of the illnesses associated with it. According to Hippocratic doctrines, the justification for linking blood with Spring lay in the observation that blood increased in the Spring and decreased in the Autumn.

Furthermore, Spring expressed the nature of blood perfectly, being warm and humid’ (Conticelli 2001: 59). This link to the seasons should again be seen in light of the doctrine’s origins in Empedocles, who suggested that good health, but also the extent of a man’s intelligence, was dependent upon the relation between the four elements in the blood, which he considered the vital principle in the body and the seat of consciousness (o.c. 55). As such, the doctrine of the four elements and the doctrine of the humours that was developed out of it were expanded into a system that suggested complex interrelations between man and nature.

It would remain canonical throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where it was also developed into a framework for categorising character traits. For example, it was, and sometimes still is, said of certain people that they were sanguine, or phlegmatic: expressions that recall the humours (sanguine referring to blood, phlegmatic to phlegm). This theory of humour as temperament plays an important part in Ben Jonson’s theory of the “humours” in drama. Northrop Frye explains that in Jonson’s theory a “humour” refers to ‘the character dominated by what Pope calls a ruling passion. [...] He is obsessed by his

humour, and his function in the play is primarily to repeat his obsession. A sick man is not a humour, but a hypochondriac is, because, qua hypochondriac, he can never admit to good health, and can never do anything inconsistent with the role that he has prescribed for himself. A miser can do and say nothing that is not connected with the hiding of gold or saving of money’ (AC 168). This brings us back to our earlier observation that characters in comedy do not develop in any significant way: they are “humours” or what we might call stereotypes.

As humours they perpetually stick to the same patterns of behaviour, which occasions the element of repetition in comedy. And as Frye explains, ‘the principle of humour is the principle that unincremental repetition [...] is funny. [...] Repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern’ (ibid.).

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Humour’s Plastic

which means that they have the ability to change shape, to extend, and to shrink without limit. This ability is linked, for Eisenstein, to a basic biological process which is in turn connected to the origins of comedy. It is because Disney’s work has this plasmatic aspect that it can entertain without being superficial. In this sense the two arguments are connected.

Eisenstein sees Disney’s work as an avenue of escape out of the drudgery of everyday life. ‘Disney is a marvellous lullaby for the suffering and unfortunate, the oppressed and deprived. For those who are shacked by hours of work and regulated moments of rest, by a mathematical precision of time, whose lives are graphed by the cent and dollar. Whose lives are divided up into little squares, like a chess board, with the sole difference that [...] its black squares do not alternate with white ones, but are all of a protective grey colour, day after day. Grey, grey, grey. From birth to death. Grey squares of city blocks.

Grey prison cells of city streets. Grey faces of endless street crowds. The grey, empty eyes of those who are forever at the mercy of a pitiless procession of laws, not of their own making, laws that divide up the soul, feelings, thoughts, just as the carcasses of pigs are dismembered by the conveyor belts of Chicago slaughterhouses, and the separate pieces of cars are assembled into mechanical organisms by Ford’s conveyor belts. That is why Disney’s films blaze with colour. [...] That is why the imagination in them is limitless, for Disney’s films are a revolt against partitioning and legislating, against spiritual stagnation and greyness’ (o.c. 88). Obviously, this kind of escape from everyday life is not

The suggestion that humour is related to a vital force within our organism, and that its structure is episodic, also plays a significant role in the work of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Among Eisenstein’s massive theoretical writings, which span several published volumes and an enormous amount of unpublished material, there is a set of notes and short texts from the 1940’s on the work of Walt Disney and, related to it, the art of drawing (Eisenstein 2006: 79-210). Although it would seem highly unlikely for a Soviet artist, especially one who was so dedicated to Soviet propaganda filmmaking as Eisenstein, to extoll the virtues of an American filmmaker with huge popular appeal, Eisenstein’s admiration for Disney was profound.

In fact, Eisenstein numbered Disney among the greatest filmmakers of all times. His admiration for Disney was based on at least two elements. First, Eisenstein believed that Disney’s cartoons and animated features offered an authentic and non-ideologic way for the oppressed masses of capitalism to escape, for the duration of the films, their plight. If we strip away the ideological critique of capitalism that underlies this approach, this argument amounts to the claim that Disney offered escapism without being trite or ideological. In this sense, Eisenstein found in Disney’s work a very rare artistic purity. The second reason is more crucial and relates to the formal elements of Disney’s work. In Eisenstein’s analysis Disney’s figures appear as plastic and “plasmatic,” 10

necessarily a good thing. One need only think of Marx’s critique of religion as opium for the masses to see that Disney’s colourful daydreams could also be seen as a form of oppression, a capitalist entertainment used to render the masses docile.

Eisenstein rejects such an interpretation. He acknowledges the danger of ‘obliviousness as a means of lulling to sleep; obliviousness as a way of distracting thought from the real to the fantastic; obliviousness as a tool for disarming the struggle.’ But he also maintains that ‘this is not what Disney gives us. In contrast to the “big” American screen, the small screen of Disney’s cartoons does not deliver a pile of “happy ends” – happy only on the screen; nor a gilded lie about the fast-paced, honest careers and generosity of capitalist magnates; nor a base sermon, slurring over social contradictions. [...] Disney is simply “beyond good and evil”. Like the sun, like trees, like birds, like the ducks and mice, deer and pigeons that run across his screen’ (o.c. 93).

The full scope of Eisenstein’s argument becomes clear if we place this glorification of Disney in the context of Eisenstein’s analysis of Disney’s visual style. For only then do we find that the ‘limitlessness’ of Disney’s work, its ‘revolt against partitioning and legislating,’ and the nietzschean ‘beyond good and evil’ quality of the animals and other natural elements in Disney’s films are based on a vision of how Disney’s work relates to the structure of our deepest biological nature. The key to this analysis is what Eisenstein calls ‘plasmaticness,’ matter’s ability to constantly and endlessly change shape and to behave ‘like the primal protoplasm, not yet possessing a “stable” form, but capable

of assuming any form’ (o.c. 101).

Plasmaticness is everywhere in Disney, and it comes in several forms, especially in the many short cartoons called Silly Symphonies. Eisenstein often refers to the short cartoon Merbabies (1938; director George Stallings), which shows animals changing form and combining parts of different species to create hybrid creatures such as a fishtiger or an octopus-elephant that ‘mock at the categories of zoology’ (o.c. 88).

He also points to several early Mickey Mouse shorts where he finds ‘the steamboat that folds logs like pastries; there are the hotdogs whose skins are pulled down and are spanked; there are the piano keys which bite the pianist like teeth’ (o.c. 94). In another short cartoon ‘Mickey starts to sing, his hands folded together. The hands echo the music as only the movements of Disney’s characters are capable of echoing a melody. And then reaching for a high note, the arms shoot up far beyond the limits of their normal representation. In tone to the music, they stretch far beyond the length allotted them. The necks of his surprised horses stretch the same way, or their legs become extended when running. This is repeated by the necks of ostriches, the tails of cows, not to mention all the attributes of the beasts and plants in the Silly Symphonies’ (o.c. 95). This infinite ability for stretching and shrinking, this ‘triumph over all fetters, over everything that binds’ (o.c. 88) is the limitlessness of Disney’s work, its revolt against partitioning. It is ‘a rejection of onceand-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to assume dynamically any form’ (o.c. 101).

‘This,’ Eisenstein concludes in a set of ‘Notes on Drawing’ that he wrote a decade earlier, in 1932, ‘is the 11

plasmatising of solid objects: the stretching of necks, legs, the rhythmical swaying of trees, of solid figures, etc.’ (o.c. 190).

As is clear from the examples that Eisenstein mentions, plasmaticness comes primarily in two forms, namely ‘(1) a varying of contour – expanding necks and legs, or (2) variations of species: octopuses-elephants, striped fish-tigers in Merbabies’ (o.c. 149). A third form, suggested in Eisenstein’s notes on drawing, would be ‘the seemingly groundless scattering of extremities’ (o.c. 103), bodies being ripped apart and put together again, ‘like quicksilver scattering and rolling back into a cohesive little ball’ (o.c.

190). The root form would seem to be the varying of contour. In fact, ‘plasmaticness of contour’ (o.c. 125) is of special concern to Eisenstein because he believes it relates to the earliest human drawings, namely what he calls ‘the stroke drawing, as a line, with only one contour,’ which can be seen in cave drawings (o.c. 127). The contour line of Disney’s figures is such a stroke drawing. The principle of the stroke drawing can be explained, as Eisenstein at one point does, with the example of a wire coat hanger. He illustrates it with a cartoon by Saul Steinberg which shows a woman bending wire hangers into contours of faces and dogs (o.c. 204). Similarly, Disney’s plasmatic animals and Mickey Mouse are an outline which is stretched and bent to fit the needs of the story. They are as elastic as a piece of chewing gum: you can pull it in all directions, but it can always be rolled back into a ball. Eisenstein also points to other examples of plasmaticness outside Disney, such as ‘the spineless circus performer’ (o.c. 103) who can bend his or her body as if it contained

no skeleton, and the work of Salvador Dalí, where ‘even the very objects become plasmatic (for example, a drooping watch, folded over like a crêpe)’ (o.c. 190). To this list we might easily add the Looney Tunes cartoons of the rival Warner studios, where characters such as Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry seem to be virtually indestructible, surviving episode after episode of being blown to pieces with bombs and guns, being cut to pieces, or crushed under rocks or other heavy objects, or crashing down from very high buildings. The classic example of this protean ability for shapeshifting is of course the Olympian god Zeus, who presents himself to prospective sexual partners in the shape of animals or other gods. Eisenstein even jokes that, ‘leafing through Ovid, several of his pages seem to be copied from Disney’s cartoons’ (o.c. 124). Finally, it is impossible, when reading Eisenstein’s notes on the importance of contour, not to think of the Italian cartoon series La Linea, in which a mere horizontal line is folded (very much like the wire hangers Eisenstein refers to) into the shape of a human figure.

It is now clear why Eisenstein experienced Disney’s work as a profoundly liberating force ‘beyond good and evil’. Instead of simply presenting us with a morality or an ideological indictment of the human condition, Disney digs deeper and provides us with images that speak to the heart of our biological nature: he takes us back into a world that seems to be protoplasmic in quality, where every creature, whether plant, animal, or human, has the ability to shift shapes infinitely and survive any manner of physical distortion. As such, ‘Disney constantly gives us prescriptions for folkloric, 12

mythological, pre-logical thought’ and is ‘always rejecting, pushing aside logic’ (o.c. 104). For this reason, ‘Disney’s pictures are pure ecstasy – all the traits of ecstasy (the immersion of self in nature and animals, etc.). Their comicality lies in the fact that the process of ecstasy is represented as an object: literalised, formalised’ (o.c. 126).

This final point is crucial because it relates to the importance of contour. In Disney’s cartoons we get an outlined figure such as Mickey Mouse, which is literal and formal in the sense that it has a clearly circumscribed form (it is a figure), but which at the same time has the quality of formlessness in its infinite capacity for change and mutation. As such, something primal, liberating, and shapeless, namely plasmaticness, is given shape. This is what Eisenstein holds to be the source of its comical nature. It is interesting at this point to note a parallel to Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy. For Nietzsche (as for Langer), Greek tragedy dealt with the workings of Fate, which is formless in the sense that we cannot contain or control it. In tragedy, Fate is given a form, which is the narrative of the play. Briefly, on the tragic stage, the formless is given form, is offered for our contemplation, providing us with an occasion for release and comfort, for reconciliation with life. Disney provides a similar occasion for release from the drudgery of everyday life by offering us a form, namely a drawing which becomes animated, and that expresses the utter formlessness that lies at the very heart of all organic life. We are all plasma, we are shapeshifters, and to see the plasmatic resilience of Disney’s indestructible creations take shape before our eyes, is to have restored to our consciousness, for a brief moment,

our innate and inexhaustible capacity for change. And that is why, as we saw in our discussion of Langer, comedy is essentially episodic in nature: life constantly reaffirms itself. Stretched and bent out of recognition, Disney’s figures snap back into form and reaffirm themselves, moving on to their next transformation.

13

Camp

sometimes also as superstars (a usage that Andy Warhol would copy and make famous). To perform was to create a pose and bring it to life. But the poses that the creatures preferred were hardly serious: they were an insult to normality and good taste.

And this is what camp is all about.

‘Camp, as Jack Smith practised it,’ Nayland Blake has astutely observed, ‘is an attitude of profound seriousness and connoisseurship directed at an inappropriate subject’ (Blake 1997: 180). Camp achieves its effects of estrangement and humour because it treats banal or unusual objects with a seriousness that seems disproportionate to the object’s actual value. In performance, camp emerges when a person gives a bad performance with total dedication.

This means that it is very difficult to contrive camp. It is something that comes about. Whenever people try to be camp on purpose, one often ends up with mere irony: a series of camp-like poses that are played for laughs because they lack the sincerity of true camp.

The great inspiration for camp, at least for Smith, was the actress Maria Montez, a Technicolor screen goddess from the 1940s who appeared in a number of exotic adventure films such as Cobra Woman (Robert Siodmak, 1944). Montez was a dreadful actress.

But she had such an unshakeable belief in her own abilities that her performances acquired a grandeur that was nearly sublime. She was totally dedicated and totally sincere in her badness. One of Smith’s key theoretical statements about his work is an essay on Montez called ‘The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez’, published in the Winter 1962-63 issue of Film Culture. In this essay Smith

If we leave the realm of animation for live feature films, we run into camp, a mode of performance that is often (but too easily) associated with comedy, which makes us overlook its seriousness. Camp is associated with gay underground culture. Its greatest exponent, and the touching stone for its excellence, is the work of filmmaker, performance artist, and exotic designing genius Jack Smith, whose film Flaming Creatures (1963) epitomises what camp is about. In this film, a number of performers of uncertain gender engage in outrageous poses and end up performing an orgy on the roof of a building while plaster rains down on them, supposedly as the result of an earthquake. The film has a casual sexual frankness. Smith has often maintained that he considered the film a comedy. In a famous 1978 Sémiotexte interview with Sylvére Lotringer, Smith said about the film that ‘I started making a comedy about everything that I thought was funny’ (Smith 1997: 107). In an undated letter to the Village Voice, which J. Hoberman quotes in his reconstruction of the making (and subsequent censorship trials) of Flaming Creatures, Smith writes that he included transvestites in the film ‘because of the visual comedy’ and that the film itself was ‘as complete as possible a collection of the funniest and hopefully hilarious things I knew at that time’ (Hoberman 2001: 17). The creatures of the film’s title, however, point to a deeper philosophy behind Smith’s work. Smith referred to his performers as creatures and 14

writes that Montez’ greatness lies in the fact that ‘she believed and thereby made the people who went to her movies believe. Those who could believe, did. Those who saw the World’s Worst Actress just couldn’t and they missed the magic’ (Smith 1997: 25). People who cannot see the magic of Montez look for another kind of magic in performance, which is the magic of the academically appropriate performance, ‘the most inevitable execution of the conventional pattern of acting. What they can appreciate is what most people agree upon – GOOD PERFS’ or good performances that yield ‘a magic of sustained efficient operation (like the wonder that the car motor held out so well after a long trip)’ (ibid.). For Smith, the good performance in this conventional sense can give us nothing. Watching it, one cannot feel ‘anything real about woman, about films, about the world, various as it is for all of us, about men.

But to see one person – OK if only by some weird accident – exposing herself’ (o.c. 26) is to see a deeper human truth shine through. For that reason Smith claimed that a bad performance could be ‘triumphantly revealing’ of the person behind the role (Hoberman 2001: 22). Smooth and efficient acting is mechanical and therefore devoid of life. When the acting is bad, the real personality and therefore something authentically human shines through. Actresses like Montez, who make up in dedication what they lack in talent, ‘TRANSCEND FILM TECHNIQUE. Not barely – but resoundingly, meaningfully, with magnificence, with the vigour that one exposed human being always has’ (Smith 1997: 30). The badness of the performance is a phoniness: the role is not played

convincingly and is therefore exposed as a performance, as play-acting. But for Smith phoniness should be ‘valued as rich in interest & revealing. Why do we object to not being convinced – why can’t we enjoy phoniness?’ (o.c.

33) Smith also applied this principle to his own films, where he preferred ‘non actor stars to “convincing” actor-stars – only a personality that exposes itself [...] (human slips can convince me – in movies)’ (o.c. 35).

From this analysis emerges a dual principle. On the one hand, J. Hoberman has argued, Smith ‘downgraded narrative to insist upon the essentially visual nature of movies.

On the other, [...] the essay was consecrated to the mystery of the human presence’ (Hoberman 1997a: 15). Film performance is about presence. This is linked to posing. And posing is linked to Hoberman’s observation that, for Smith, film was a visual rather than a narrative medium.

The import of a film image does not lie in the solid performance but in the revelation of personality through sincere posing. This visual element also suggests the importance of decoration, both in the exotic way Smith’s sets were constructed and in the importance attached to costume.

According to Hoberman, Smith often said that the costume ‘was the character. The actor only brings it to life’ (Hoberman 1997b: 156). Similarly, Jerry Tartaglia, who supervised the restoration of Smith’s films, says that in his stage performances Smith would often appear ‘in various roles, or should I say “costumes,” since he worked on the assumption that a costume created a role’ (in Leffingwell, Kismaric and Heiferman 1997: 211). In its ultimate consequence, this approach to acting leads to the actor’s body as a 15

mannequin on which a role is draped.

Richard Foreman has observed that ‘to watch Jack Smith perform was to watch human behaviour turn into granular stasis, in which every moment of being seemed, somehow, to contain the seed of unthinkable possibility’ (Leffingwell 1997: 78). Or as Ronald Tavel, an early Smith collaborator and later a writer for Warhol’s films and playwright for the Theatre of the Ridiculous, observed, Smith ‘thought that as sculpture seeks the perfect three-dimensional object, [...] film must seek the perfect two dimensional object in motion, and finds it in Maria Montez’ (Tavel 1997: 95).

But Smith’s aesthetic decoration was not limited to costume: it enveloped his entire environment in what amounts to nothing less than a fusion of art and life. Over the years Smith decorated his apartment with exotic junk, ranging from sheer fabrics through fake plastic trees, ‘furnishing his room,’ as Edward Leffingwell puts it, ‘with pickings from the invisible department store of the street’ (Leffingwell 1997: 71). The result was akin to an elaborate film studio, a work of art to live in. ‘Art is one big thrift shop,’ Smith once observed (Tavel 1997: 99), a fantasy world pieced together from the refuse of the world.

Although this approach was grounded in real poverty, making do with junk because there was no money to buy new objects, it was equally grounded in a critique of capitalist culture that formed the philosophical heart of Smith’s work as an artist. Irving Rosenthal, who was a model in a number of Smith’s photographs of the early 1960s, points out that ‘we were really poor and it was alright to be poor. It was our aesthetic to use

whatever was at hand. Everybody went out “junking”’ (Rinder 1997: 143).

Lawrence Rinder has called this ‘a culture of impoverishment’ and claims that, for Smith, ‘the transformation of detritus into art was almost an alchemical ritual’ (ibid.). As Nayland Blake observes, Smith’s work ‘rests on two aesthetic assertions: first, that art is being made around us all the time – every time we arrange something – and that everyone is acting all the time; and second, that the organisations supposedly dedicated to presenting, preserving, and fostering art are actually engaged in endless attempts to stamp it out’ (Blake 1997: 173). The second point in Blake’s observation goes to Smith’s critique of capitalism, which he sees as a conspiracy of the rich and powerful to oppress the people and all forms of free creativity.

One of the central mechanisms that is used to facilitate this oppression is rent: the idea that people should pay and pay again to make use of the world they already inhabit. Although Smith’s several statements on this point are sometimes muddled, his insight is lucid and represents a Marxist analysis of the way capital operates. As Edward Leffingwell points out, Smith ‘believed that an unholy team of manufacturers, schools, government, and churches had allied to consolidate power and authority none of them could maintain alone. And, that together, this group of makers, teachers, legislators, and priests could shift the blame for social ills from the institution to the individual, enforcing the individual’s dependence on the state. Poverty and the inability to transform creative activity into gainful employment, for example, were the consequences of wilful dissent, and the failure to 16

recognise and embrace the obvious contributions of capitalism. Smith identified as conspiracy the enforcement of conformity through dependence on the way things were constructed by society for its own preservation’ (Leffingwell 1997: 70).

In the interview with Lotringer, Smith is very eloquent on the evils of rent and the way it is linked to his programme for a new society. Smith begins by explaining that, for him, ‘socialism is to try to find social ways of sharing. That’s all. And to replace the dependence upon authority with the principle of sharing. Because it’s very likely that there would be much more for everybody, thousands and more times for everybody if things were shared. We’re living like dogs from all the competing. [...] Capitalism is terribly inefficient. The insane duplication, the insane waste [...]. I mean this is not productive’ (Smith 1997: 114). He then goes on to present an alternative, for ‘I can think of other types of societies... Like in the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don’t want anymore, which they would take to this giant junkyard. That would form an organisation, a way that the city would be organised... the city organised around that. I think this centre of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a centre of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it’ (o.c. 115) in the way that Smith’s own films, performances, and apartment decorations grew out of it. The result would be what Smith, according to J. Hoberman, sometimes called ‘a Free Paradise of abandoned objects’ (Hoberman 1997a: 17). Smith next addresses the issue of rent and ‘the whole fantasy of how money is

squeezed out of real estate. It supports the government; it supports everything. And it isn’t even rational.

When is a building ever paid for? The person that built the building is dead long since, and yet it can never be paid for, it has to be paid for all over again, every month. [...] People that live in a place and maintain it and build it, why do they own it less than the government’ (Smith 1997 116) or the capitalist? The point is legitimate: most people who pay rent these days are simply paying their landlord’s mortgage, in effect buying it for him.

So why shouldn’t they own it? True to form, Smith at one point wrote his landlady a letter saying that ‘after all these years of seeing that you always got money I now find that you do not appreciate it. I’m afraid I must ask you to either stop praying for me or else present the building to me as a gift.

This I think you will find is all you can do and will be the cheapest thing for you to do. And it should be done graciously’ (in Leffingwell 1997: 77).

17

Kitsch

understand Luzi and, on a broader level, to understand the mechanism of kitsch, we will have to meet Luzi, the film, and kitsch on their own terms and take them seriously.

In a very good discussion of Von Praunheim’s films Klaus Kreimeier has made this point by engaging Bertolt Brecht’s claim that the tastelessness of the masses is rooted much more deeply in reality than the supposedly good taste of intellectuals (‘Die Geschmacklosigkeit der Massen wurzelt tiefer in der Wirklichkeit als der Geschmack der Intellektuellen’; quoted in Kreimeier 1983: 7). The bad taste of the masses is perceived by intellectuals as a transgression against a taboo on kitsch in better circles. The masses revel in objects that are supposedly worthless and cheap, whether they are porcelain figurines, heart-shaped pillows, or scarves with the colours of one’s favourite soccer team.

Paradoxically, intellectuals also revel in kitsch, but their appreciation is legitimated through irony, which keeps the kitsch objects at a safe distance. The crucial difference in the way the masses and intellectuals appreciate kitsch lies in the question of sincerity. For the masses, kitsch is the object of worship. Kreimeier claims that the masses look for traces of happiness in kitsch objects. A heartshaped pillow expresses an ideal of love, a deep sentiment that people look for.

The intellectuals’ ironic detachment from kitsch objects means that their attitude in fact mocks the sincerity of the masses.

The intellectuals take something that is entirely serious for one group of people and then treat it with condescending disdain. This means that they mock the meaning of life as it is expressed, for a large group of

Jack Smith’s attitude to the world of discarded objects, junk, and trash found a European counterpart in the films of Rosa von Praunheim, a filmmaker on the fringe of the New German Cinema who achieved overnight fame (or infamy) with Die Bettwurst (1970), a film made for television in which an eccentric office clerk, played by Von Praunheim’s aunt Luzi Kryn, befriends and falls in love with a flaming creature in the shape of queerer than queer Dietmar Kracht, which leads to much camp lovemaking in Luzi’s boudoir and a highly unlikely abduction scenario. Die Bettwurst shifts the accent from camp performance to an appreciation of kitsch. Luzi’s flat, which is expressive of the taste of the petit bourgeois of the early 1970’s, is a visual assault of pink and vulgar paraphernalia. The Christmas tree that she and Dietmar are decorating in one of the film’s key scenes is as baroque as one could imagine. And through a considerable part of the proceedings overweight Luzi wears a flimsy babydoll that has a wicked charm, even if it does not really become her. In short, Luzi’s flat is a kitsch cornucopia.

However, this is no reason for Von Praunheim to ridicule his characters. In fact, just like camp, kitsch should be taken entirely seriously. People who revel in kitsch objects and kitsch decoration rarely feel they are making an ironic statement. They genuinely like the trifles that they collect around them. In Die Bettwurst Luzi feels thoroughly at home in her bizarre and utterly tasteless interior. So to 18

people, in those objects. It is for that reason that Freud called irony the lowest form of humour: it mocks sincerity, it is an empty laughter at the expense of others.

What is interesting about this analysis is the way it exposes an emptiness at the heart of the intellectuals’ irony.

When kitsch is censored by relegating it to the realm of bad taste (unless it is recuperated through irony), this censorship is really aimed at the desire for happiness. By placing kitsch beyond the pale of good taste, intellectuals immediately suggest that the naive quest for happiness that kitsch expresses is equally illegitimate.

The masses, or any person who engages sincerely with kitsch, have an opposite approach: by embracing kitsch, and finding an image of happiness in it, they do not push the objects of kitsch away, as happens in ironical distancing, but pull them towards themselves.

Kreimeier explains this by quoting Walter Benjamin’s claim that ‘in kitsch the world of objects approaches people; it surrenders to touch’ (o.c. 8). This brings to mind Marx’s analysis of object fetishism, the process by which the labourer invests part of himself in the objects he makes. In Only Connect (2011) I have argued that this projection of self also includes the projection of meaning onto the world.

People invest objects with meaning.

Kitsch objects contain meanings related to happiness, a utopian vision of life as it should be. In kitsch objects these values and desires become palpable, they are made present to the touch. Kitsch is a surrender to this sensuality, a union with objects. So the taboo on kitsch, which is a taboo on (the quest for) happiness, turns out to also be a taboo on sensuality. In

intellectual circles, especially those concerned with art, value resides in the realm of ideas, the intellectual, the theoretical. Art equals reflection equals intellectual. Kitsch equals sensuality equals vulgarity. The intellectual position rejects the tangible, the sensual, the “merely” beautiful, and hence kitsch. Kitsch objects are supposed to be one-dimensional, cheap, and tasteless. They express naive concepts of the world (the heartshaped pillow as a symbol of true love). Intellectuals simply do not do that. When they do recuperate kitsch, they do it through irony, keeping the feelings they reject at bay.

Von Praunheim’s film reclaims the naiveté of kitsch, and in doing so, it also reclaims the quest for happiness.

Bad taste obeys the laws of desire: it expresses deeply felt needs and desires in an entirely serious way. For Kreimeier, this is the key to understanding Die Bettwurst. Luzi’s house is excessively decorated in an exotic kitsch style, with pink colours, plastic objects, gilded trifles, and heavy curtains. ‘She lives,’ Kreimeier writes, ‘in a dreamkitsch jungle of a proletarian, petit bourgeois culture of devotion’ (‘sie lebt in einem TraumkitschDschungel der kleinbürgerlichproletarischen Devotionalienkultur’; o.c.

12). In this respect, the glorious horror of Luzi’s kitsch interior is similar, both in style and attitude, to the way Jack Smith used junk to generate beauty. As Stefan Brecht once observed, Smith’s piles of junk form ‘a landscape of desire’ (in Leffingwell, Kismaric and Heiferman 1997: 43), a longing for the purity of sentiment. Luzi’s entire interior asks the question ‘where is happiness?’ (o.c. 13) It answers that question by taking commercials seriously: what if the commercials 19

were right after all? What if owning this dress, this pair of shoes, drinking this brand of soda, reading this magazine, wearing this lipstick, or owning a particular commodity or trinket could indeed make me happy?

What if the objects that surround me were indeed conducive to happiness?

This is the kitsch attitude: one takes the tacky commercial objects that fill the environment entirely serious. One does not doubt their sincerity. One does not doubt their message. On the contrary, the very truth and meaning of life is felt to inhere in them because they exude that truth and meaning. It is the belief that utopia might exist after all and that these objects hold the key to attaining it. Kitsch is simply an attempt to remake the world in a better mould.

But what holds for kitsch, also holds for art in general, as Northrop Frye makes clear when he claims that Shakespeare’s comedies illustrate ‘the archetypal function of literature in visualising the world of desire, not as an escape from “reality,” but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate’ (AC 184). What art does, and what kitsch does, is trying to envisage utopia. The kitsch attitude, and the style of living it engenders, may be very funny. But it is never laughable because there is no irony involved. When we watch Die Bettwurst we laugh with Luzi and Dietmar, not at them.

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Kicking Till It Hurts: Satire

The hero of tragedy is an extraordinary character who is struck down by greater powers. His fate is tragic because we never forget the glory that he seemed destined for. The hero of irony lacks that glory: he is an ordinary mortal like us whose clash with Fate inspires in us thoughts about our own vulnerability. We look down upon a scene of bondage and frustration, and it is a looking down because we pity the ironic hero and feel relieved that we are not in his desperate situation. In this sense we are above him. But we do not have the sense of superiority that marks the intellectual’s ironic attitude to kitsch. We still take the ironic hero seriously and as we watch his plight we feel a pang of recognition of our shared humanity.

In satire, irony is taken a step further.

As Frye explains, ‘satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured’ (AC 223). In satire we no longer simply look down upon a scene of human bondage but we also rebel against it. We take issue with its absurdity. ‘Irony,’ Frye explains, ‘is consistent both with complete realism of content and with the suppression of attitude on the part of the author.

Satire demands at least a token fantasy, a context which the reader recognises as grotesque, and at least an implicit moral standard, the latter being essential in a militant attitude to experience. [...] The satirist has to select his absurdities, and the act of selection is a moral act’ (AC 224). In other words, irony comes about whenever we see a fellow human being in a state of devastation. The very fact that this scene is presented to us, without any authorial comment, makes it moving and may inspire feelings of pity. The

Our discussion of kitsch has yielded a rather one-sided view of irony. Irony does not always imply a sense of superiority as in postmodern intellectuals’ irony. Northrop Frye makes this clear in his discussion, which we referred to above, of the relation between the hero’s powers and our own in fiction. We recall that the hero’s powers might be greater than, more or less equal to, or inferior to our own. When the hero of a fiction is ‘inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode’ (AC 34).

This suggests a connection between irony and tragedy. After all, tragedy is the mode in which a hero is overwhelmed by powers beyond his control, which are called Fate. The classic case, we argued, is Oedipous, who tries to evade his destiny, only to unwittingly run towards it. Frye warns against the reductive theory ‘that all tragedy exhibits the omnipotence of an external fate’ (AC 209) because such a fatalistic reduction ‘does not distinguish tragedy from irony’ (AC 210). It is ‘significant that we speak of the irony of fate rather than of its tragedy. Irony does not need an exceptional central figure: as a rule, the dingier the hero the sharper the irony, when irony alone is aimed at. It is the admixture of heroism that gives tragedy its characteristic splendour and exhilaration’ (ibid.).

In other words, what distinguishes irony from tragedy is in part the nature of its hero.

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irony lies in the distance we nevertheless feel to this miserable person, in whom we still recognise our equal. In satire a human injustice, a form of pedantry, or an instance of stupidity is deliberately chosen by the author as the butt of satire. The satirist explicitly wants to comment on the scene and his comment consists in the satiric tone of his presentation. That means that ‘the satirist commonly takes a moral high line’ (AC 225).

Where the ironist shares his humanity with the person in bondage, the satirist feels superior to his subject.

There are several kinds of satire. One of the most common is what Frye calls ‘the satire of the low norm. It takes for granted a world which is full of anomalies, injustices, follies, and crimes, and yet is permanent and undisplaceable. Its principle is that anyone who wishes to keep his balance in such a world must learn first of all to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut’ (AC 226). In such satire we are offered ‘counsels of prudence’ and are recommended to stick to ‘conventional life’. The wisdom of such satire is reactionary and ‘does not question the logic of convention’. The hero of such satire ‘takes an attitude of flexible pragmatism’ (ibid.). So the satirist of this first kind will mock society’s conventions, but he does not challenge them directly. However, a second form of satire may develop from the first which does call society and its norms into question. In this second form ‘the sources and values of conventions themselves are objects of ridicule’ (AC 229). It is a form of satire that finds expression in ‘the picaresque novel, the story of the successful rogue who, from Reynard the Fox on, makes conventional society look foolish without setting up any positive

standard’ (ibid.). The basis structure of this second form of satire consists of ‘the setting of ideas and generalisations and theories and dogmas over against the life they are supposed to explain’ (AC 230). If the first form of satire accepts society, the second rejects it. But it puts nothing in its place. It does, however, testify to a dedication to the human measure in life. In fact, ‘it is precisely the complexity of data in experience which the satirist insists on and the simple set of standards which he distrusts’ (AC 232). Despite the fact that satire can be devastatingly savage, it is humane at heart. A fine and very famous example of this awareness of the human norm is Jonathan Swift’s devastatingly funny A Modest Proposal (1729) in which he proposes that the government deal with poverty by having the population eat its infants: a child eaten at the age of one will no longer be a burden on its poor parents or on society, it will be spared the humiliation of having to go out begging, and in fact will make its parents a handsome sum of money when sold.

But the second form of satire still implies some kind of norm. Swift’s piece, for example, still assumes that it is a moral norm that one does not treat people like disposable objects and that poverty is a serious social ill in need of urgent remedy. The standards and dogmas of society are rejected because they do not fit the experience of life as it is actually lived. Economically, it may be a law that there will always be poverty. But in the realm of real life there is no reason why there should be poverty, especially when it is possible to eradicate poverty through redistribution of wealth. The world and its rules are made by humans; therefore, nothing is definite and 22

everything can be changed if we will it so. What is often lacking, is will. The second form of satire says that real life as experienced by real people should take precedence over hard and fast rules and moral dictates. But this attitude still presupposes a kind of common sense standard, ‘notably that the data of sense experience are reliable and consistent, and that our customary associations with things form a solid basis for interpreting the present and predicting the future. The satirist cannot explore all the possibilities of his form without seeing what happens if he questions these assumptions’ (AC 234). When all convention, even common sense convention, is considered to be mere convention with no absolute value, the satirist becomes free to resort to the obscene. If all norms go out the window, it is no holds barred for the satirist, who can be scatological, perverse, insulting, or vulgar. A harsh form of satire may now emerge. If norms evaporate, human beings can be taken down from their pedestal of morality and reason and be exposed as the animals that they really are. If we may return again to the example of Swift: liberal economy may seem rational and civilised in theory, but beneath the veneer of civility lies a dog-eat-dog world where people are treated like objects. A third form of satire exposes this underlying barbarism and confronts us with man’s bestial nature. When this happens, ‘the riotous chaos of Rabelais, Petronius, and Apuleius satire plunges through to its final victory over common sense’ (AC 235). Mankind is portrayed as grotesque, absurd, cruel, and bestial.

23

The Nazis Are Coming! The Fascists Are There!

‘Welcome to freedom!’ a leering lesbian cannibal sneers at a hysterical girl whose boyfriend has just been reduced to mincemeat. In the rich free West cannibalism is the norm: eat or be eaten. Or, to quote a group of cannibals hacking away at their victims: ‘In a time where everything is possible, it is no longer important whether something is good or bad.’ Terror 2000 demonstrates that the fate that befell the immigrants that did make it across the border was not necessarily better.

The year is now 1992 and the situation in unified Germany has changed dramatically. The refugee centres are swamped and the local population is rebelling. The police rule the street with violent force. Peter (Peter Kern) and Margret (Margit Carstensen), two special agents, are dispatched to the town of Rassau to investigate the fate of the Polish Pavlak family, who were transported by train to Rassau but never reached their destination. The social worker who accompanied them (played by Gary Indiana) has also mysteriously disappeared. Arriving in Rassau, Peter and Margret are shocked to discover that the town is ruled by a gang of neo-nazis who operate from a huge furniture store. Armed with two guns and a notepad, the twosome decide to battle the forces of evil while Margret wonders out loud where all that hatred is coming from.

It is no coincidence that Schlingensief draws attention to the plight of immigrants in these two films. One can hardly help but notice the analogy between the way the Jews (and other undesirables) were deported by the nazis and the way contemporary Europe, despite its declarations of human rights, treats its illegal immigrants. The very fact that immigrants can be considered “illegal”

In our own time, this particularly savage form of satire has been taken to the limit in the work of German film and theatre director Christoph Schlingensief, especially in his films dealing with nazism, the so-called German trilogy, which consists of 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler: Die letzte Stunde in der Führerbunker (1989), its grand guignol sequel Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker (1990), which shows the unification of Germany in 1990 as an exercise in xenophobic butchery, and Terror 2000: Intensivstation Deutschland (1992), which prophetically deals with the resurgence of fascism in contemporary Europe.

The German chainsaw massacre of Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker starts on October 3, 1990, the day when East and West Germany become one again. With the disappearance of the border and the iron curtain a huge stream of migration started. According to an intertitle at the beginning of the film, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the East now live peacefully among us, but four percent of them never reached the West. Schlingensief’s film tells their story by staking out the border between the two former countries and documenting how a group of cannibals ambushed hapless immigrants and reduced them to sausage stuffing.

Literally. The relentless butchery of immigrants by cannibals is, obviously, a metaphor for the triumph of liberal politics in the West, where economic freedom means that the war of all against all has been unleashed again.

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and that this means that it is okay to ship them off to wherever proves that there are still many undesirables on this planet and that self-proclaimed civilised countries would rather not welcome them within their borders.

Today, however, undesirables are no longer disposed of through ingeniously gassified showering systems but through the crushing banality of a bureaucracy that reduces people to cyphers that can be manhandled into obedience and stamped out with a stamp on a form.

Today we have laws against racist speech, laws proclaiming basic human rights, and laws condemning nazism.

But all this is but a thin layer of veneer beneath which the original fascism is still seething. This was made dramatically clear in Schlingensief’s June 2000 installation Bitte liebt Österreich, created for the Wiener Festwochen. On the square in front of the Vienna opera Schlingensief constructed a structure of containers modelled on the Big Brother television show. In this structure twelve asylum seekers were housed. The public could watch their every move around the clock via a system of cameras. Every day the viewing public could vote two asylum seekers out, who would then be required to leave the country. The eventual winner would receive five thousand German Marks in small bills and eight women of marital age. Both Left and Right were appalled by the installation. What people found most objectionable was a big billboard that Schlingensief had made, reading ‘Ausländer Raus’ (‘Foreigners Out’) and which had been mounted on top of the containers. Schlingensief saw the sign as a test to see ‘how long a country could bear to have to tolerate such a

sign at the heart of its capital’ (in Lilienthal and Philipp 2000: 116).

Obviously, the installation was a catch22. With the slogan ‘Foreigners Out’ Schlingensief was simply taking the claims of Jörg Haider’s FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party) literally. Since the FPÖ had just celebrated a huge triumph at the elections, one could fairly suppose its sentiments faithfully represented the sentiments of the average Austrians, or at least a representative set of Austrians. If the sign was taken down (by force, by court ruling, or by communal decision) this would be an attack on the freedom of artistic expression and an example of censorship. If the sign remained, it would seem that the people of Austria condoned its message (which they in fact had in electing Haider). The effect of the installation was like a viral load injected into Austria’s bloodstream.

The reactions were violent, activists even tried to liberate the asylum seekers and were shocked to discover that there were actual people in the containers (and actual asylum seekers at that). Bitte liebt Österreich was a successful installation because it succeeded in exposing the hypocrisy at the heart of a supposedly civilised nation. It scraped away the veneer and, according to philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, demonstrated that reality is something ‘against which no inoculation is possible’ (o.c. 226). By staging a performance/installation Schlingensief brought out the reality of life in Austria. He showed how both liberal ideals and right-wing populism choose to ignore the reality of the human condition under global capitalism. ‘Truth happens in the hidden,’ Schlingensief claimed (o.c.

225). In this case, the hidden was the interior of the containers: a world in 25

which people, subjected to the random lawlessness of a life beyond the pale of legality, can indeed be made into sausage stuffing because we, the fine upright citizens of civilised nations, could not care less.

Behind the spectacular bravura of Schlingensief’s films and installations lurks a profound philosophical insight into our society as a society of risk and games of chance. Underneath the proposed truth of our society, which is supposed to be about human dignity and respect for human rights, lies a deeper and darker truth. This hidden truth takes the form of a game of chance. According to Schlingensief the re-emergence of nazism in contemporary society has very little to do with historical nazism. It is really a marketing ploy, an attempt to secure a place for oneself on the globalised capitalist marketplace where nothing or no one has an intrinsic right to exist and where every man can therefore by definition be considered expendable.

Unchecked capitalism causes hatred and violence between people and transforms them into moral speculators. The economist Andre Kostolany puts it like this: ‘Those who have a lot of money can speculate; those who have little money should not speculate; those who have no money at all must speculate’ (o.c. 36).

In other words: the less you have, the riskier your existence, and the more you are forced to take irresponsible chances to secure your place in society.

According to Schlingensief neo-nazis are often people who, for some reason or other, feel that society has very little to offer them. They feel left out and can see no way in. Hence, they feel forced to take a gamble with their life. They must take a risk in order to try and achieve some kind or recognition. They

are forced, in other words, to speculate with their life. Neo-nazis put their money on generating hatred against other people: by generating hatred against strangers they hope to start a movement in society. If the movement garners any power at all, it will generate chances in the marketplace.

After all, if neo-nazism or its derivative right-wing extremism become popular, there might suddenly emerge a market for neo-nazi cafés, music, publishing, paraphernalia, and so on. Neo-nazis are entrepreneurs; immoral entrepreneurs, no doubt, but who are we kidding when we say that there is also such a thing as a moral entrepreneur?

From this perspective it is surely no coincidence that the neo-nazis of Terror 2000 operate from a furniture store: they are middle-class entrepreneurs at heart, working the market for all it’s worth. But in this game of chance the neo-nazis and the immigrants they hate turn out to be each other’s mirror image. They both share a lack of perspective. But the illegal immigrant has nothing to speculate with apart form his or her body, which is gambled on traffickers, sweatshops, or pimps. To pay a shady entrepreneur a huge sum of money to be smuggled to the other side of the globe is gambling on a huge scale. Similarly, the actual immigrants who participated in Bitte liebt Österreich were taking a gamble.

They obviously hoped that the media attention generated by the installation would have a positive influence on their chances to be allowed to stay in Austria. Because filing for asylum is also a gamble. It is to submit one’s life to the Transparant Democracy of bureaucracy, where the thumbs up or thumbs down of a stamp on an anonymous piece of paper decides 26

whether you stay or go. If you lose, you are deported: you don’t pass the bank and you have forty-eight hours to get lost. Welcome to freedom! In this grotesque reduction of human tragedy to a game, or to outrageously grotesque cinema, Schlingensief takes satire to its cruellest limit. But both his films and the installation Bitte liebt Österreich exemplify the essence of satire: they hold the rules and regulations of society up to the demands of the lived reality of life and find them lacking. Schlingensief’s work rejects society and, hovering between the second and third forms of satire, seems to offer little hope of finding anything better to replace it with. But the labour of his work is important and necessary: it exposes the dark heart of a society that has taken its humanity out with the trash. Swift was right: we are cannibals all.

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Playtime

character of Mr Hulot, a somewhat clumsy man with a pipe and umbrella who is forever coming into conflict with the trappings of modern life.

Hulot had earlier been featured in Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1952) and Mon Oncle (1958), but Playtime would be his most ambitious outing. The film takes Mr Hulot into a capital city, for which a huge outdoor set was constructed.

Although the film is nominally a comedy, there are few actual gags or jokes in it. The humour is derived from the fabric of the entire film and the way this formal fabric represents the fabric of the vital experience of urban life. As Jean-André Fieschi has remarked in a very insightful essay on Tati’s work, Playtime is constructed around the structural factor of the 70mm widescreen format. Into this huge frame, which could be likened to the canvas of a painter, several formal structures and elements are introduced and combined into something that could be said to resemble a visual ballet. From Hulot’s wanderings through the tightly organised geometrical structures of a glasswalled office building through the wonderful finale in which the cars on a roundabout engage in a carousel-like dance, Playtime is an essay in visual poetry that expresses the rhythms of urban life. ‘The frame is an immense receptacle of paths, trajectories, swarming masses, actions and interactions, an almost abstract and gigantic stage peopled with figures, colours, movements and rhythm, an area of a dissemination which could be called fortuitous if behind the appearance of chaos the law of its arrangement did not imperiously appear’ (Fieschi 1980: 1005). This law is the principle of a network, a rhizome of events that are at once formal

We started our exploration of humour with Langer’s observation that ‘the pure sense of life is the underlying feeling of comedy’ (FF 327). We have expanded this claim in many directions and it would be foolish to think that our brief survey could answer all questions pertaining to humour. In fact, many important questions have not even been raised.

But it should be clear that humour, funniness, and comedy are not the same, and that irony and satire are different still. But all these phenomena share a family resemblance that always circles around the pure sense of life that is at the heart of comedy and that is the cause of laughter. This sense of life has been the common thread through our entire discussion.

Eisenstein’s discussion of Disney, for example, rests on the idea of plasmatic vitality, an indestructible sense of aliveness. And satire, no matter how devastating, is always born from the sense that the norms and rules of society do not fit the felt experience of life and hence do not fit the human measure of things. Humanity and the life of mankind are the core element of humour. Wherever life is expressed, smiles and laughter may follow, comedy may emerge, satire may present itself. It is therefore proper to conclude our exploration of humour with a brief discussion of Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), a film that expresses the pure sense of life with exemplary purity.

Playtime is one of several Tati films featuring the director himself as the 28

elements in a pattern. Every figurative or narrative element in the film is simultaneously treated as a formal element in the pattern of the film as visual structure. In this sense, form and content fuse in Playtime, which represents the forms of life as a vital pattern of forms. This is especially clear in the film’s most famous sequence, a visit to a posh restaurant that in a matter of minutes is reduced to total hilarious chaos. The seemingly spontaneous way in which the complex movements of the dozens of actors in this sequence degenerate into seemingly random disarray is a wonderful piece of lifelike mise en scène. It is the importance of this formal element that turns Playtime into an abstract work of art. The film is essentially a structure of functions.

This is especially clear if we look at the role of Mr Hulot himself. In the earlier films Hulot had been the focal point of the action, the person around whom the narrative was organised. In Playtime Hulot loses his privileged position and ‘becomes what he was always tending towards: a simple function. There is no fixation, no deceptive reference in the midst of an immense, constantly changing space’ (ibid.). Hulot is one strand or element among others in the visual fabric of the film.

What kind of network does Playtime represent? It is the fabric of modern urban life, the absurd and absurdly organised efficiency of the bureaucratic capital. To the extent that the film exposes the absurdity of modern living, it has a streak of satire in it. To the extent that not Mr Hulot or any other human character is its subject, but the capital city itself, the film is abstract. The star of the film, its central subject, is the urban environment and

the rhythms of its lived experience, the way it presents itself to vital sentience.

It is the mood and the feel of the capital, its rhythms and pulses, that Playtime expresses, and everything in the film is an element in ‘a calligraphy based on order and variation’ (ibid.): the huge sets, the automobiles, the glass walls, the revolving doors and escalators, the squeaky chairs, and even all the people in it. In this film gags are still present, but they are not trying to be funny anymore: their function is subordinated to the structure of the overall formal fabric of the film. As Noël Burch explains, ‘for Tati, a gag can be started in one sequence, completed in another, developed in a third, entirely repeated in a fourth, rejected in a fifth, etc. ...

This is just one of the means by which he reaches a formal unity through discontinuity of discourse’ (in Fieschi 1980: 1002).

Tati hardly ever straightforwardly delivers a joke.

Rather, his films are fabrics through which he generates ‘purely formal suspense. [...] Tati places the foundation of a gag as meticulously as Hitchcock lays the foundation of a dramatic resolution’ (Fieschi 1980: 1002). By way of example Fieschi offers a sequence from Les Vacances de M. Hulot in which a child has to climb a flight of stairs and turn a doorknob high above his head while holding an ice-cream cone in each hand. Contrary to what we would expect, the child manages to pull this off and the comic release of seeing the ice-cream fall does not occur (this would also be a fine illustration of Kant’s claim that laughter erupts when we do not experience release at the end of building tension). This illustrates how the texture of comedy in Tati is the sequence of tension and release that 29

governs actual life, sometimes delivering the joke (release) and sometimes not. This takes us straight back to Langer, for in Tati comedy arises from the stuff of life, the pure sense of vital experience. Summarising Tati’s approach, Fieschi explains that ‘at first rarefying anecdote, characters and décor almost to the point of abstraction, he then nourishes the development of his film almost to the saturation point so that a single

viewing is inadequate for arriving at a real understanding of the resonance and repercussions of the signs employed’ (o.c. 1003-1004). Art imitates life: a vital fabric of experience, too complex to grasp in one viewing, but represented in a formal construction which is the work of art, the virtual image of the felt experience of life.

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© 2011, Christophe Van Eecke en Lokaal 01

ThRu is de Theoretische Ruimte van Lokaal 01

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