COMMENSAL ISSUE 93

Dear Theo

Shortly after submitting my C92 contribution I came across an English translation of 'Le Rire' in a second-hand book-shop (Henri Bergson: 'Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic'; London 1911).

He writes: ". . we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing." Having said this, he proceeds to set forth his "central image: something mechanical imposed on something living", explaining how, in his view, it is germane to every level and sort of humour.

It seems to me that behind Bergson's "central image" lies the subject/object dichotomy that bedevils human life. He writes: "What, therefore, incited laughter was the momentary transformation of a person" (subject) "into a thing" (object). Laughter, it seems to me, arises when the ambiguous nature of the human being -as both subject and object, living conscious person and thing subject to the second law of thermodynamics etc. - becomes evident, or is alluded to or brought to light in some way. Laughter itself is a partial release of the chronic unconscious tension that arises as a result of living on the horns of the resultant dilemma.

However it has to be said that humour, as a "living thing", by and large evades the net of my inadequate powers of analysis. I had attempted to examine the ridiculous newspaper headlines that you mention (C92/12) in the light of the above, but my efforts fall so far short of the sort of logical cogency so well displayed by Malcolm Burn's contribution on another subject (C92/35) that I shall refrain from inflicting my efforts upon the Commensal readership. Instead I shall pass on to a few remarks on Rick Street's macaque dilemma (C92/23).

"Monkeys can exhibit sympathy to the feelings of other monkeys" writes Rick. "Would this not require them to perceive themselves as monkeys?" It seems to me possible that a monkey (or any other animal that is not possessed of a fully developed reflexive awareness) -in so far as it is conscious of its own existence at all, perceives itself as 'a monkey that is not another monkey' . In other words, it has a negative perception of itself, rather than a positive one of itself as a discrete entity. When reflexive awareness of the sort that can be demonstrated in primates such as chimpanzees and human beings arises, the negative 'space' begins to be -as it were- filled with that which we call a self. This is so particularly after the advent of language, which arises around the resultant subject-object dichotomy in order to enable a social cosmos to arise from the chaos of individual selves. 'Nature' in this analysis, (and further to your [ie. "my", Ed] remarks in response to Norman Mackie (C92/29)) is the sum total of organismic functioning, where this is devoid of reflexive awareness, in all the complexity of its ecological inter-dependence.

"It" (the monkey) writes Rick, "must know that it has a face... It knows what another monkey's face looks like and it knows that it's a monkey." But prior to reflexive awareness and the forms of language that reflexive awareness enables, 'the monkey' and 'the face’ do not exist in the discrete terms that language implies, and nor does any possible linguistic relation between the two. Despite what I say above - which is simply an attempt to explain in words something that is prior to language - there is no 'monkey' and/or 'other monkey' prior to reflexive awareness, only a matrix of relationships from which these distinctions eventually arise.

Yours sincerely

Michael Nisbet

Michael : it’s interesting that you had trouble fitting examples of humour into the theory. Any theory has to be judged on its application to new data : can it explain phenomena not explicitly used to create it ? If not, the theory needs refinement. I agree with your quote from Bergson: any attempt to define humour is pretty dull in comparison with the real thing.

Theo