You Have to `Be There`: Shaun Robert May

S. R. May
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You Have to ‘Be There’:
A Heideggerean Phenomenology of Humour
Shaun Robert May
Submitted for Ph.D examination
Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London
March 2013
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Declaration of Authorship
I, Shaun May, declare that this thesis is composed by me and that all the work herein
is my own, unless explicitly attributed to others. This work has not been submitted for
any other degree or professional qualification.
………………………………………………….
Shaun May
Parts of this thesis have been published, or are forthcoming, in the
following articles.
May, S. (2012) ‘Embodiment, Plasticity and the Disclosiveness of Failure’, Body,
Space and Technology. Vol. 11, No. 1. (§3.1)
May, S. (2012) ‘Anthropic Object and Anthropomorphic Things’, Puppetry
International. Spring 2012, Issue 31. (§3.2)
May, S. (2013) ‘Rise of Being-in-the-World’ in Huss, J. (ed.) Planet of the Apes and
Philosophy. Chicago, Open Court. (Ideas in chapter 6)
May, S. (forthcoming) ‘Heidegger, Object Theatre and Fundamental Ontology’ in
Watt, D, & Katsouraki, E. (ed.) Thinking Theatre: Performing Philosophy. Newcastle,
Cambridge Scholars. (§5.2)
In addition, sections from this thesis have been provisionally accepted for
publication as part of the following articles.
Object Failure and Equipmental Transgressions, Film-Philosophy. (§4.1 & 4.2)
Abject Metamorphosis and Mirthless Laughter, Performance Research. (§6.5 & 7.2)
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the faculty and course support staff at Central, particularly
Prof. Robin Nelson, Prof. Simon Shepherd and Dr. Joel Anderson who provided
invaluable feedback at crucial stages throughout the process. I would especially like to
express heartfelt gratitude to my primary supervisor, Dr. Tony Fisher, without whom
I suspect this thesis simply would not have been possible.
Many thanks to Hannah Ballou, David Batho and Nora Aveston for reading this thesis
and offering generous and insightful feedback. Jess Hartley, Mark Swetz, Marcelo
Bere, Lisa Woynarski, Jo Ronan, Anna Brownsted, Jon Davison, Rachel Cockburn,
Young Yoo and the rest of the Ph.D cohort for embracing a collegial spirit that has
made my time at Central a genuine pleasure. Dr. Olly Double for initially sparking my
intellectual excitement for comedy when I was an undergraduate. Dr. Dan Watt, Sean
Myatt and all the other exciting practitioners and researchers I met at the Object
Theatre Network. Ollie Evans, Cat Ferriera, Prof. Mark Fleishman and everyone at the
UCT Ph.D Summer School. I would also like to thank my flatmate Owen, whose
indifference to this whole enterprise has been strangely reassuring.
I dedicate this thesis to my loving family – my father, mother, sisters, grandparents,
nephew and niece – who have supported me immensely. In particular, to my late
grandfather, Vic Heard, whom I still miss terribly.
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Abstract
You Have to ‘Be There’: A Heideggerean Phenomenology of Humour
In this thesis, it is my intention to use Heideggerean phenomenology to build an
account of two seemingly disparate areas of humour. Firstly, humour that arises out
of a shift between ontological categories - specifically, between the ‘human’ and the
‘object,’ on one hand, and the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ on the other; and, secondly,
between objects and bodies failing. In doing so, I hope to elucidate the ‘hermeneutic
condition’ of all humour, understood in Heidegger’s terms as the phenomenon of
world.
A hermeneutic condition is not to be thought of along the vein of a ‘necessary and
sufficient condition’ of something being comical. There have been a number of
attempts to try to pinpoint such a condition, with theories gravitating towards the ‘big
three’ of incongruity, superiority and release. Personally, I am not convinced that
there is such a condition - I think it more likely that certain types of humour share
some traits, but there are no traits shared by all humour that can act as a marker that
humour is afoot. Similarly, a hermeneutic condition should not be understood as a
causal condition - I am not claiming that something is funny because of this
condition. Rather, my suggestion is that the phenomenon of world is a necessary
condition of humour’s intelligibility – we are the sort of creatures that can make and
comprehend jokes because we are in-the-world, in Heidegger’s sense. I will suggest
that it is only for Dasein that either getting the joke or failing to get the joke is a
possibility, and this is precisely because only Dasein has this hermeneutic condition.
Developing this claim necessitates the pursuit of a thoroughly worlded
phenomenology, and to that end I want to suggest Heidegger’s work as an ideal
foundation.
Moreover, I will suggest that the humanlike objects and animals which amuse us are
tacitly playing with this being-in-the-world, and the object and body failing has the
potential to disclose this nature of this world to us. In this way, I hope to demonstrate
that there is much to be gained from the phenomenological analysis of these two types
of humour.
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Table of Contents
Part One – Theoretical Component
1. Introduction
1.1 What is a Phenomenology of Humour?
1.1.1 What is Phenomenology?
1.1.2 More Than Mere Illustration
1.1.3 How it all hangs together
1.2 A Preliminary Account of Heidegger’s Ideas
1.2.1 Objects
1.2.2 Animated Objects
1.2.3 You Have to ‘Be There’
1.2.4 Not Like a Spoon
1.2.5 Failed Embodiment
1.3 Methodological Remarks
1.3.1 ‘10 Types of Theory’
1.4 Chapter Outline
2. The World
2.1 Koestler and Incongruity
2.1.1 Know-how, Know-that and the Prevailing Doctrine
2.1.2 Category Mistakes and Ghosts in Machines
2.1.3 Remarks on privacy
2.1.4 Mind Reconsidered
2.2 Freud, Release and the Psychology of Humour
2.3 Remarks on Superiority
2.4 Critchley’s World
2.4.1 Animals Being Humanlike
2.4.2 Object Morphism
2.4.3 Searching High and Low for Exemplary Phenomena (Detour)
2.5 Carroll on Bergson and Skillful Coping
2.6 The World in our Sights
2.6.1 A Dark Detour
2.6.2 Critchley on Humour Noir
2.6.3 Heidegger on Death
2.7 Comic Embodiment
2.8 Conclusion
3. Dasein
3.1 The Issue of Embodiment
3.1.1 Embodiment and Normativity
3.1.2 Contra Clark
3.2 The Issue of Objects
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3.2.1 The Phenomenon of the Puppet
3.2.2 Baron-Cohen and ‘Mind-blindness’
3.2.3 Robots Reloaded
3.2.4 Return to Puppetry
3.2.5 The Semiotic View of Puppetry
3.2.6 A Remark on Death and ‘Thingdom’
3.2.7 Conclusion
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3.3 Animals and Worldhood Poverty
3.4 Conclusion
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Part Two - Phenomenological Component
4. Phenomenology of Dysfunctional and Deficient Objects
4.1 Equipmental Transgressions
4.2 The Three Types of Unreadiness-to-hand
4.2.1 Equipmental Malfunction (Conspicuousness)
4.2.2 Temporary Breakdown (Obstinate)
4.2.3 Permanent Breakdown (Obtrusive)
4.3 The Present-at-Hand Modality
4.4 Conclusion
5. Phenomenology of Anthropic Objects (and a ‘Real Girl’)
5.1 Failure and Puppet Manipulation
5.1.1 Principles of Saliency (Or Puppetry 101)
5.2 Svankmajer’s Stop-motion and the Anthropic Object
5.2.1 Detour into Ethics
5.2.2 Back to Svankmajer
5.3 Short Circuit and the Anthropic Robot
5.4 Reflections on the Anthropic Object
5.5 Lars and the Real Girl
5.1.1 Bianca as an Occurrent Object
5.6 Conclusion
6. A Phenomenology of Animals
6.1 Animality and Worldhood Poverty
6.2 Feeding and Eating
6.3 Living with and Being With
6.3.1 ‘Positive’ Normativity
6.3.2 Understanding Others and Letting the World Do the Work
6.4 Living vs Existing (Or: The Possibility of Authenticity)
6.4.1 Self, Authenticity and Narrativity
6.5 Humans Becoming Animal
6.5.1 Private Languages and Beetles in a Box
6.5.2 Response to Critchley
6.6 The Anthropic Animal ‘Collapsing Back into Animality’
6.7 Conclusion
7. Phenomenology of Bodily Impairment
7.1 ‘Anthropic Bodies’
7.1.1 ‘Possessed’ Hands
7.1.2 Dissociative Identity Disorder
7.2 Conspicuousness, Obstinateness and Obtrusiveness
7.3 Physical Impairment and Temporal Phenomenology
7.3.1 Temporal Incongruity in Comedy
7.3.2 Impairment, Entropy and Temporality
7.4 Bodily Impairment in Beckett’s Endgame
7.4.1 Endgame, Impairment and Anxiety
7.4.2 Endgame and the Question of Meaning
7.4.3 Critchley and the ‘Relational’ Nature of Finitude
7.4.4 Anxiety and Humour
7.5 Comedy, Impairment and Narrativistic Authenticity
7.5.1 Contra Critchley
7.6 On the Prosthetic
7.6.1 Adam Hills and the Unsexy Foot
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7.6.2 The Broken Tool and the Impaired Body
7.7 A Final Carelian Thought
7.8 Conclusion
8. Conclusion
8.1 Summary
8.2 Contribution to New Knowledge
8.3 Areas for Development and Further Exploration
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Bibliography
Books and Articles
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Films and Other Recorded Media
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Live Performances
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Data DVD with Appendices
DVD
A Note on the Appendices
Alongside this printed document I have included a data DVD with four digital
appendices. If you open this disc on any computer (PC or Mac) you should see four
folders entitled ‘Appendix 1’, ‘Appendix 2’, ‘Appendix 3’ and ‘Appendix 4’. These
folders contain the clips discussed in chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 respectively. Also included
on this disc is a pdf version of this thesis. All of the files are free from DRM and
compatible with the widest range of devices possible, in the hope that the reader will
be able to read, watch and listen to them in whatever manner they prefer.
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Part One - Theoretical Component 1. Introduction
In this thesis, it is my intention to use Heideggerean phenomenology to build an
account of two seemingly disparate areas of humour. First, anthropomorphic humour
- that is, an object or animal seeming humanlike. Second, the comic failure of objects
and bodies. In doing to, I hope to elucidate what I will call the ‘hermeneutic
conditions of humour’, following Taylor Carman’s reading of Being and Time in
Heidegger’s Analytic (2003). In the next section I will explain what I mean by this,
and how the thesis hangs together more generally.
1.1 What is a Phenomenology of Humour?
Perhaps the best place to begin is with the title of the thesis – You Have to Be There: A
Heideggerean Phenomenology of Humour. As a starting point, let’s just focus on the
subtitle and, acknowledging that Heidegger’s phenomenology is part of the
philosophical tradition, change that specific piece of methodological jargon to
‘philosophy’.1 What we are left with is a clear, concise statement of the central aim of the
thesis – to develop A Philosophy of Humour. So, what is a philosophy of humour? To
answer this question, I want to look at how Stephen Mulhall conceptualises the
philosophy of film.
[Philosophy of Film] is constructed on the model of ‘philosophy of history’,
‘philosophy of science’, ‘philosophy of religion’ and so on. This is philosophy in
its essentially parasitic mode: the philosopher inserts herself into another
domain of human practical activity and raises questions about its grounding
assumptions. (Mulhall 2008a:130)2
1 Essentially I’m viewing philosophy as the discipline and phenomenology as the methodology. So, technically this
thesis could have been entitled ‘A Heideggerean Philosophy of Humour’, but it would have been less precise.
2 Mulhall seems to initially suggest that these are not the sort of questions that practitioners can answer qua
practitioners, but I think this is challenged later on in the book (Mulhall 2008a) so it would be misleading to quote
it without contextualization.
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In a similar vein, I want to claim that my thesis constitutes a philosophy of humour –
I consider myself to be raising questions about the fundamental grounds of comic
intelligibility (i.e. the grounds of our ability to ‘get’ the joke). Mulhall goes on to state,
regarding the philosophy of film, that ‘these kinds of questions…[bear] upon the
conditions for the possibility of cinema’ (Mulhall 2008a:131). Similarly, my thesis
attempts to address the conditions for the possibility of humour, or what I will call
their ‘hermeneutic conditions’.3
However, this might seem a little woolly and abstract, so in order to grapple with
precisely what Mulhall means I want to look at a specific example of the philosophy of
film. As I will return to his work later on in this thesis, I will look at Noël Carroll’s
essay Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image. In this essay, Carroll tries to
unpick what cinema – or, more precisely, the moving image – is. The following
passage offers a concise summary of his position.
X is a moving image 1) only if x possesses a disembodied viewpoint (or is a
detached display); 2) only if it is reasonable to anticipate movement in x (on first
viewing) when one knows what x is; 3) only if performance tokens of x are
generated by templates; and 4) only if performance tokens of x are not artworks.
Moreover, these conditions provide us with the conceptual resources to
discriminate the moving image from neighbouring artforms like painting and
theater. (Carroll 1995:81-2)
Although I broadly agree with Carroll’s claims here, we need not worry too much
about their validity. Rather, I want to draw your attention to the kind of enterprise
that Carroll is undertaking – he is trying to understand what makes the moving image
what it is. Importantly, this is already taken for granted in most commentaries on film
– if I were to argue with a friend about whether Return of the Jedi is better than The
Empire Strikes Back then such a dispute takes for granted an understanding of what a
movie is. In this way, I think this is a clear example of what Mulhall refers to when he
uses the term ‘philosophy of film’ – it attempts to understand the nature of film itself.
However, it might be worth briefly commenting on what I believe Carroll means when
3
This will be defined shortly.
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he uses the word ‘conditions’. My reading of this passage is that he is trying to outline
the necessary conditions of something being a moving image, not its hermeneutic
conditions. The former can be understood as answering the question, ‘what makes the
moving image the thing that it is?’ and the latter answers the question, ‘what makes us
the kind of beings that can understand it?’ Importantly, both of these are questions of
ontology.
Carroll’s discussion has a direct parallel in performance theory, with Peggy Phelan’s
claims about the ontology of performance. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
Phelan tries to pin down precisely what makes performance what it is, and, although
her job title is ‘Professor of English and Drama’ rather than ‘Professor of Philosophy’,
I have no doubt that her ideas contribute to the philosophy of performance. The
following passage summarises the crux of her argument.
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved,
recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of
representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other
than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the
economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.
Performance’s being…becomes itself through disappearance. (Phelan 1993:146)
This notion is more clearly expressed in the statement that ‘performance in a strict
ontological sense is nonreproductive’. (Phelan 1993:148) Again, the point at issue is
not the validity of the claims presented – for a critique of this view see Auslander
(2008 & 1997) – but rather the enterprise being undertaken. Phelan is trying to
understand what makes performance the thing that it is - as with the discussion of
Star Wars, this is already taken for granted in most intelligent discussions of a
specific example of performance.
In my thesis I will use examples from both film and performance, but my project does
not attempt to address the fundamental nature of either artform. Rather, the focus of
my study is humour – what makes us the kind of beings that can make and
comprehend gags. Any insights into the ontologies of either performance or film are
accidents arising from the subject matter. (Here I am thinking specifically of failure of
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theatrical representation. For an interesting discussion on the relation between failure
and ontology see Cormac Power’s Performing to Fail: Perspectives on Failure in
Performance and Philosophy). In order to address how I aim to achieve this we need
to look at precisely what phenomenology is, and how it relates to ontology.
1.1.1 What is Phenomenology?
Phenomenology seems initially to have been defined rather well by performance
theorist Stanton B. Garner, Jr., but I will suggest that his definition actually excludes
the sort that I intend to use – Heideggerean phenomenology. This is despite
acknowledging the difficulties of a broad definition for such a wide variety of
approaches under this umbrella.
Generalizations are risky with field that has included figures as various as
Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Paul
Ricoeur; it might be more accurate to speak of “phenomenologies” in reference
to these and others in the philosophical tradition…Yet all these figures and
movements are joined by a mutually entailing set of aims: to redirect attention
from the world as it is conceived by the abstracting, “scientific” gaze (the
objective world) to the world as it appears or discloses itself to the perceiving
subject (the phenomenal world); to pursue the thing as given to consciousness in
direct experience; to return perception to the fullness of its encounter with its
environment. (Garner 1994:2)
This conception of phenomenology does not, in my view, cover what Heidegger was
setting out to achieve in Being and Time. Heidegger was explicitly and vehemently
opposed to the bifurcation of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, as we find in Garners articulation.
Conceptualising his work as simply a description of ‘the world as it appears to the
subject’ would at best be a superficial reading, and at worst a grave misreading, of the
text. In Heidegger’s view, both ‘subject’ and ‘consciousness’ need radical
reconceptualising, and that is precisely the work that he is doing with his concept of
Dasein. Taking up Garner’s suggestion that we instead talk of ‘phenomenologies’, I
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want to pursue a distinction between Garner’s conception of phenomenology and
what Laverty (2003) calls ‘Hermeneutic Phenomenology’.4
In Heidegger’s opinion, all understanding is connected to a given set of
forestructures, including one’s historicality, that cannot be eliminated. One,
therefore, needs to become as aware as possible and account for these
interpretive influences. (Laverty 2003:9)
So what is at issue in Being and Time is not simply a description of one’s experience
but an elucidation of the structures without which there couldn’t be understanding. It
is in precisely this sense that it is hermeneutic – where hermeneutics refers to the
study of interpretation or understanding.5 As Taylor Carman puts it, in a quotation we
will return to, Being and Time is ‘an account of hermeneutic conditions, which is to
say conditions of interpretation, conditions of our understanding something as
something’ (Carman 2003:23) It is this conception of phenomenology that I want to
draw on in my thesis.
In the previous section, drawing on Mulhall’s formulation of ‘Philosophy of Film’, I
suggested that my philosophy of humour will raise questions about the fundamental
grounds of comic intelligibility. I call these the hermeneutic conditions of humour, as
they are the structures without which we could not make and appreciate jokes. Put
another way, they are what makes us the kind of beings that can ‘get’ the joke. To be
clear, I am not asserting that they are reason for something being funny but, rather,
that they form the fundamental foundation which grounds our ability to get the joke.
Moreover, although these hermeneutic conditions are necessary for joke
comprehension they are not sufficient conditions – Dasein can either get the joke or
fail to get the joke. In fact, it is only Dasein who can fail to get the joke at all. The
notion of failing to do something implies the possibility of success – the wind might
relocate a chess piece from one square to another but it makes neither a ‘valid move’
nor an ‘invalid move’. The wind does not participate in the interlocking practices and
4 Laverty was not the first person to use the term ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ - in fact, Heidegger himself used a
similar phrase to describe his project in Being and Time. However, Laverty (2003) is the clearest explanation of
the distinction that I have encountered.
5 Heidegger (1996) draws out a crucial distinction between ‘understanding’ and ‘interpretation’ which is
fundamental to his philosophy. At the moment we needn’t worry about that – in this case I am simply using these
terms in their everyday sense.
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norms that make up a game of chess, and therefore we cannot meaningfully describe
it as a chess player - either a poor or an excellent one.
At the moment I am very aware that I am open to a certain criticism – that I am
making the assumption that such foundations exist without actually defending that
point here. In response to this suggestion I would make the following points – firstly,
it is notable that as far as we know only human beings are capable of humour
comprehension, and moreover it is a human universal. This suggests to me that there
is something fundamental about being human that enables – perhaps even inspires –
this trait. Secondly, if at this stage I was able to robustly defend this position here
then there would be no need to write the thesis. In fact, because of the very nature of
the claim it is not possible to ‘prove’ it analytically with reasoned argument. Simon
Glendinning describes phenomenology as ‘a work of explication, elucidation,
explicitation or description of something with which we already understand, or with
which we are already, in some way, familiar, but which, for some reason, we cannot
get into clear focus for ourselves without more ado’. (Glendinning 2007:16) If I am
right in asserting the existence of these hermeneutic conditions of humour then,
precisely because they are taken-for-granted and largely unnoticed, they must be
elucidated phenomenologically. Of course, there is still the need to set out and defend
my critical framework, and situate my claims within the existing literature, and that is
precisely the aim of Part One, the theoretical component of the thesis. Glendinning
rightly acknowledges that phenomenology is treated with suspicion from certain
analytic philosophers who see the purpose of philosophy to construct arguments ‘in
the narrow sense of a discussion that moves through a series of inferential steps from
premises to conclusions’. (Glendinning 2007:20) I imagine such philosophers would
be equally frustrated by Part Two of this thesis, which works through a range of comic
examples but doesn’t construct the syllogisms that are characteristic of professional
analytic philosophy. However, if I am correct in my conception of phenomenology
then the ‘argument’ should be inextricably linked to the examples, without either
‘theory’ or ‘practice’ being bifurcated. In order to develop this a little further, I want to
return to the notion of a philosophy of film.
1.1.2 More Than Mere Illustration
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Following on from the quotation mentioned earlier, Mulhall makes the bold (and
perhaps controversial) claim that film can be philosophy. I personally have no doubt
that it can, but that is not the point at issue here. Rather, I want to address the
problems with the dichotomy that some people have pressed between film actually
doing philosophy and film being ‘mere illustrations’ of philosophical ideas. Whilst I
do not doubt that there is, at least, some distinction to be made here, I think
Wartenberg (2006) is right to problematize it as a rigid dichotomy. Picking up on
something Mulhall said in the first edition of On Film (albeit a criticism to which
Mulhall tries to respond to in the second edition), Wartenberg says the following.
[I question] the validity of Mulhall’s dichotomy between “handy or popular
illustrations “ and “thinking seriously and systematically”. This dichotomy
suggests there is a domain of serious and systematic thought – to which the
films he is interested in belong – and one consisting of handy or popular
illustrations of the views developed by philosophers that does not count as
involving serious and systematic thought. (Wartenberg 2006:24)
As Wartenberg argues, if Mulhall means ‘serious’ as opposed to ‘humorous’ then the
equation of philosophy with seriousness is flawed. (Or, at least, Wittgenstein6 would
have argued to the contrary). Moreover, Wartenberg argues that the equation of
philosophy with systematic thought is flawed because it would exclude people like
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. This might be an unfair reading of Mulhall’s
view – I’m not convinced that he does equate serious thinking with syllogisms on
non-humorous subject matter. However, Wartenberg’s main point is that
philosophers are mistaken in assuming that the working through of illustrative
examples cannot, in itself, contribute to the philosophical canon. I tend to agree with
him, and I think he brings this point out forcefully when he uses Chaplin’s Modern
Times to elucidate certain aspects of Karl Marx’s thought – ideas which are vague and
general when read in the abstract but which, when embodied in the virtuosic body of
Chaplin, are specific and pronounced.
According to Norman Malcolm’s memoir, Wittgenstein once said, ‘a serious and good philosophical work could
be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious)’. (Malcolm 2001:27-8)
6
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Although Marx claims that worker’s bodies became machines, he did not provide
a detailed account of what about factories do this, nor how such mechanization
takes place, particularly in the new context of the assembly line. The view of the
human body that the film presents, while perhaps not realistic, does convey the
toll that the assembly line takes on its workers. And the idea that the human
mind becomes mechanical is itself a stroke of comic genius. (Wartenberg
2006:29)
In Wartenberg’s example, the ‘theory’ and Chaplin’s expression of it are intrinsically
bound – as he says, ‘you cannot separate the film’s serious thinking about alienation
from its comic portrayal’. (Wartenberg 2006:30) In the same way, I am considering
the examples I work through in the thesis not as mere illustrations of a philosophical
idea but rather a clearer expression of fundamental structures surrounding comic
intelligibility that are not usually so noticeable.
At this point it might also be worth explicitly addressing the extent to which the
examples I work through are ‘case studies’. The answer to this question depends on
the definition of ‘case study’ that you are working with. As Silverman (2010:138)
explains, there is some disagreement, but Robert Stake identifies three different types
of case study.
1. The intrinsic case study where ‘this case is of interest…in all its particularity
and ordinariness.’ In the intrinsic case study, according to Stake, no attempt is
made to generalize beyond a single case or even to build theories.
2. The instrumental case study in which a case is examined mainly to provide
insight into an issue or to revise a generalization. Although the case is studied in
depth, the main focus is something else.
3. The collective case study where a number of cases are studied in order to
investigate some general phenomenon. (Silverman 2010:139)
I would suggest that for the most part my examples make up a ‘collective case study’,
precisely because they are used to investigate some general phenomenon – humour. If
I were intending to pursue a series of intrinsic case studies then there would need to
be far fewer of them and explored in greater depth than the reader will find here. A
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Heideggerean phenomenology of Beckett’s Endgame could, on its own, be a doctoral
thesis but that is not something that I am trying to do. The examples that I use are
chosen because I believe that they provide us with a useful insight into the
phenomenon in question - humour. In principle, I could have chosen a different
series of examples to elucidate the same structures.
1.1.3 How it all hangs together
In working through the last two sections, I hope I have left the reader with a sense of
what role the examples of performance and film will take in the thesis. The
phenomenological component will use a wide variety of examples in an attempt to
elucidate and explicate the hermeneutic conditions of humour - structures that are, in
my view, always already there but usually unnoticed. The role of the examples, then,
is not that of ‘mere illustration’ towards the ultimate goal of clarifying what Heidegger
is getting at in Being and Time. Rather, it is to unpick moments in which the
structures that are always already there are less obscured. It is with this in mind that I
chose to focus on the two seemingly disparate areas of comic failure – of objects and
bodies – and anthropomorphic humour. In my view, the object failure discloses the
context structuring our activity and the body failure can disclose our finitude.
Furthermore, it is precisely in the moments when objects and animals seem
humanlike, and the moments in which they fail to do so, that we can most clearly see
what differentiates human beings from animality and objecthood. Importantly,
because it is only for Dasein that making and comprehending humour is a possibility,
‘becoming humanlike’ entails gaining the hermeneutic conditions of humour.
These areas make up the four phenomenological chapters of the thesis, and if we
return to the quote by Taylor Carman we can see more clearly how they hang
together.
[Being and Time is] an account of hermeneutic conditions, which is to say conditions
of interpretation, conditions of our understanding something as something. Foremost
among hermeneutic conditions, of course, is the phenomenon of understanding itself,
in particular our understanding of being. Heidegger's conception of understanding as
practical competence, that is, informs his account of the availability of the things we
use in our everyday practices, the anonymous social norms that govern those
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practices - what he calls “the one” (das Man) - and finally the temporal structure of
existence itself: our “thrownness” into a world with an already defined past and our
“projection” into the possibilities or options that give shape to our future. (Carman
2003:23)
The structure of the four phenomenological chapters will follow a roughly similar pattern
to the third sentence of the quotation above:
Chapter 4, a phenomenology of object dysfunction, will elucidate Heidegger's conception of
understanding as practical competence and the availability of the things that we use in
everyday practices. Specifically, I will suggest that in moments of failure and equipmental
transgression, such as those found in the work of Chaplin, the structure underpinning this
understanding is disclosed to us.
Chapters 5 and 6, phenomenologies of the anthropic object and anthropic animal
respectively, will deepen this conception with an account of the social norms that govern
our practices and the temporal structure of existence. Crucially, I will show that objects
and animals are without these hermeneutic conditions, and becoming anthropic entails
acquiring them.
Chapter 7, a phenomenology of bodily impairment, will look at what happens when one's
worldly comportment is thwarted by bodily failure. Although Heidegger never addressed
the body in detail, I will suggest that the bodily impairment has implications for each of the
hermeneutic conditions. First, the impairment places factical limits upon what we are able
to do, including what equipment we are able to use. Second, the social norms pervading
our practices have tacit expectations about what constitutes a 'normal body', and those
norms are most clearly disclosed when those expectations are not met. As the social model
of disability argues, it is society that disables the impaired individual rather than the
impairment itself. Third, following Havi Carel, I will argue that bodily failure has the
potential to inaugurate a change in our temporal phenomenology.
In this way, it is my hope that I will be able to use comic phenomena to elucidate its own
conditions of intelligibility. The exploration of the case studies and the critical framework
that forms its foundations will be inextricably linked. Importantly, this is not a
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phenomenology of performance or film, both of which have their own ‘regional
ontologies’ that I touched on in the section on Phelan and Carroll, but of the phenomenon
of humour.
Let us turn now to the precise claims that Heidegger makes that I feel are necessary
components of any satisfactory account of the area I am addressing.
1.2 A Preliminary Account of Heidegger’s Ideas
1.2.1 Objects
Heidegger asserts that ‘readiness-to-hand’ is the primary mode in which we
experience objects. The ready-to-hand object is one that fulfils its function optimally,
and in doing so is ‘transparent’. When I use a pair of scissors to cut a piece of paper,
the phenomenon is not that I hold a ‘thing’ which cuts the paper but simply I cut the
paper. However, in failure the object suddenly emerges as salient, and it is this
emergence that is often comical.
The ready-to-hand is a modality which stands in stark contrast to the way in which
the object is traditionally construed, what Heidegger calls the present-at-hand. In the
present-at-hand modality, all objects are construed as lumps of matter which we act
upon. However, this modality is derivative - it is only when we distance ourselves
from our practical involvement with the objects that we see them as ‘things’ at all.
This reification distorts the phenomenon of the object, and we risk overlooking the
fact often when I am skillfully manipulating the equipment it becomes an extension of
me. In overlooking this fact, we find ourselves leaning towards a dichotomous
understanding of our relationship with objects - the mind/matter and
animate/inanimate distinctions that pervade much quotidian discourse.
Moreover, the ready-to-hand scissors are not ‘things’7 with isolatable properties, but
rather they form a ‘referential totality’ in which the scissors, the paper and the desk all
Readers familiar with Heidegger’s essay The Thing will notice that I am using the term in a different, perhaps
even opposite, way to Heidegger’s later writings. My reason for this is partly because I think ‘object’ has an air of
7
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relate to one another. This is perhaps best understood by way of an example. Imagine
that there is a surgeon in an operating theatre, undertaking a procedure that he has
done many times before with the same colleagues that are in the room this time. He
stretches out his hand towards a nurse. He needs the scalpel, but does not say
anything. It is clear to all in the room that the scalpel is being requested precisely
because they are familiar with this situation. The gesture can, in other contexts, be an
invitation to ‘hi-five’, or a way of getting change from the grocer, but in this concrete
context it is the scalpel that is required.
Now let’s turn to Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, with a scene
so iconic that it was the poster image. When the tramp character
is eating in a cafe, he uses a knife as a rather ineffectual tool for
scooping beans. His doing so is a concrete example of an object
being used in a way that transgresses its equipmentality. This
amusing transgression is interesting because it makes the tacit
explicit. This structure - the referential totality that underpins our
everyday being in the world - is taken for granted in our skillful coping with day-today life. In comic object failure and Chaplinesque transgressions, the object’s
equipmentality is disclosed, and it is this disclosure that will be the subject of the
fourth chapter of this thesis.
1.2.2 Animated Objects
This view of objecthood has implications for any account of object theatre and
puppetry. When I skillfully manipulate the puppet, it becomes an extension of me.
Unless it fails me, or I decide to ‘deworld’ it by thinking of it as a lump of matter, the
object is not experienced as a ‘thing’ at all. As such, I think there needs to be a very
deliberate move away from any discourse that talks of the puppet as a ‘thing which is
given the illusion of life’. Such accounts commit violence to the phenomenon.
Insisting on the essential ‘thingness’ of the well-animated object is akin to insisting on
the essential ‘pixelness’ of a digital movie - both accounts smuggle in descriptions
banality to it, and partly because object theatre – which I will refer to at various points in the thesis – is a more
established phrase than ‘thing theatre’ within the existing literature.
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from outside of the aesthetic realm that are usually neither warranted nor
phenomenologically present. Of course, there are some puppetry performances which
deliberately play with the puppet ‘qua object’, but I think it is a mistake to assume that
it is at play in all object theatre and puppetry.
Additionally, I believe that there is a great deal to be gained from a Heideggerean
analysis of object anthropomorphism. If Chaplin using his knife as a spoon is a
transgression of equipmentality, then the knife starting up a conversation would
undoubtedly be similarly transgressive. However, the object talking is of a different
order, because it is not being used incorrectly - it is not being used at all - but rather it
is becoming ‘human like’. What precisely this means cannot be ascertained without a
thorough understanding of what it is to be human.
1.2.3 You Have to ‘Be There’
Let us now consider what Heidegger says about the human being, or Dasein. Dasein
translates as ‘being there’8 - man is essentially a Being-in-the-world. This seems on
the face of it to be a truism - there aren’t many theorists who deny man’s being a
creature in the world. However, any semblance of simplicity is deceptive because of
the way that Heidegger uses the term ‘world’. Man is not ‘in the world’ in the same
way that water is ‘in a glass’ - it is does not refer to containment. This is perhaps less
surprising when viewed in light of his comments on objects. To construe ‘the world’ in
terms of matter, force and properties, as the physicist is wont to do, is effectively to
reify and ‘deworld’ it. The knife becomes a piece of metal with a certain mass and we
lose the referential context. Instead, we need to understand that we are ‘in the world’
in the same way that we say that someone is ‘in love’ or ‘in the army’. Being in the
army does not mean that you are always at a particular location, say the barracks, but
rather you have an ongoing commitment to a particular activity, with specific
equipment and the skills that go along with it. This is what Heidegger means when he
claims that Dasein is a ‘being-in-the-world’. As a sort of placeholder for the fuller
portrait of world which will emerge throughout this thesis, world is ‘the interlocking
practices, equipment, and skills for using them’ (Dreyfus 1997: 99), and my ‘being in
8
Translated literally, it is ‘There-Being’, because of the difference in German word order.
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the world’ entails an ongoing involvement with projects and activities that matter to
me.
As such, the object is not necessarily ‘human-like’ in accordance with the degree to
which it looks like a human. Rather, what is at stake is an ontological distinction.
When the object’s way of being is such that it is ‘in the world’ with us - that is, it
participates in the aforementioned interlocking practices - then it is ontologically
‘humanlike’. This is perhaps best examined with an example, this time taken from real
life. Clifford Nass of Stanford University has recently published research
demonstrating that computer programmes that synthesise speech invoke a social
response from the user. In short, the user is more polite to the speaking computer
than the non-speaking computer. (Nass 2004: 34) As Nass himself emphasises, the
participants know intellectually that the computer does not have feelings and that
their response is illogical, but this knowledge does not affect the result.
There might be a temptation to discuss the ‘paradox’ of being polite to something you
know doesn’t require it, but this is only insofar as one takes an ‘intellectualist’ stance
to our being-with-others. Within the philosophical tradition, there is a problem
known as the problem of other minds, whereby people fret about how we can know
that other human beings have minds like ours. After all, some might claim, surely all
we see is behaviour? To be blunt, anyone who is troubled by this problem has made
grave errors in their fundamental assumptions. My most basic experience with others
is not me intellectually ‘inferring’ that they have a mind, but simply my being with
them, engaging in joint projects. The problem of ‘inference’ only occurs because the
philosophical tradition deworlded the phenomena in the first place. If one
understands that our fundamental way of being is as a being-in-the-world, and a
being-with-others, then there is no room for the problem to arise. In this way, the
problem of other minds is a pseudo-problem that is dissolved when one refuses to
acknowledge the deworlding of the phenomenon that causes it in the first place.
The implications of this view are that we do not ‘infer’ that the computer requires a
social response and we don’t ‘imagine’ that the puppet has a mind. We don’t need to.
Such reflexivity is parasitic upon the fundamental way in which we are in the world
and with others. The idea that we ‘imagine’ the puppet as having a mind has a
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correlate pervasive throughout performance theory - specifically, that one ‘suspends
disbelief’. It suggests that knowing ‘it’s not real’ is a barrier that the audience has to
overcome through volition, but this does not correspond to the phenomena. When I
watched 2001, A Space Odyssey for the first time, I was gripped by the character of
HAL, and only once I approached the film more reflexively was I ‘intellectually’
impressed by the fact that Kubrick managed to create a full character out of a light.
This was achieved by portraying HAL’s being with Dave and Frank - their engaging in
projects together, HAL helping them out and then eventually their respective
intentions clashing.
1.2.4 Not Like a Spoon
It is now clear that when an object starts to ‘be humanlike’ - when it is, to use
terminology I will develop later on, anthropic - what we are dealing with is an
ontological shift. If the spoon refuses to go into my mouth because it’s afraid of the
dark, it moves away from equipmentality and towards the sort of concern that is the
hallmark of Dasein. The dog is not like a spoon - its ontological character is quite
different. Unlike the spoon, which does not have a world,9 my dog lives ‘amongst’ me
and my household, but does not live ‘with’ me in the same sense that my flatmate
does. This distinction means that the anthropic animal, by virtue of it ‘coming from’ a
different ontological position, is distinct from the anthropic object and as such we
need to resist their conflation.
Simon Critchley observed that the humanlike animal is charming, but the reverse is
disgusting. Whilst I think this is perhaps true of many cases, I think there are
counterexamples on both sides.10 As movement from Dasein to Animal necessarily
involves a move towards worldhood poverty, what is needed is full account of the
worldhood of Dasein and the poverty of the animal - one cannot intelligibly discuss
the notion of losing worldhood until we have a full portrait of worldhood to know
what’s at stake. For this reason, the issue needs to be deferred until chapter 6, by
In the sense that it does not have ongoing commitments to projects and so on.
The pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm are disgusting anthropomorphic animals and Bottom from A Midsummer
Night’s Dream is a charming zoomorphic human.
9
10
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which point a sufficiently rich portrait of worldhood and Dasein will have been
developed.
1.2.5 Failed Embodiment
Let us now turn to the final area - bodily failure. Just as I want to resist the reification
of objects - that is, turning them into brute ‘things’ and deworlding the phenomena - I
want to resist the same temptation with the body. It is essential to distinguish
between the body, the ‘lump of matter’ that is studied by biologists, and embodiment.
In order to build a preliminary account of embodiment, let us recall a significant
aspect of the ready-to-hand equipment - its ‘transparency’. That is, when the scissors
are functioning optimally, they are transparent and the salient phenomena are what I
am using them for. It seems to me that my legs, for the most part, are similarly
transparent. When I am sat in a lecture hall listening to a talk, if the seat is adequately
comfortable and my rheumatism is not playing up, both leg and seat are transparent they aren’t really present in my field of concern. If, on the other hand, the seat is
uncomfortable or I get cramp, they suddenly emerge as salient and problematic. I can
no longer concentrate on the talk - they won’t let me forget them and get on with the
task at hand.
In my view, ‘objects’ and ‘body’ are only phenomenologically distinct when they are in
the deficient modalities - that is, either failed or reified. When I am skillfully going
about the world, there is only embodiment - the transparent and dynamic toolorganism complex which ‘gets out of the way’ to allow me to go about my business.11
Moving away momentarily from phenomenology, a study by Umilta et al (2008) has
demonstrated that, when a pair of pliers is used by monkeys, the equipment literally
becomes ‘patched in’ to the motor system - for the brain, there is no distinction made
between the organic hand and the ‘artificial’ tool. This finding resonates with
Sobchack’s (2009) phenomenological account of her prosthetic leg, where she
11 There are, of course, certain projects in which we are very aware of the role that our bodies play within our
projects. Flirting was one example suggested by a colleague. Even then, though, I would suggest that it is not the
whole complex that we are aware of but certain limbs that are deemed of cultural significance.
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highlights that it is for the most part no different from her ‘biolimb’ - only in failure or
theoretical consideration does the distinction become salient.
At this point (when I have previously presented these ideas) I have encountered a
little resistance. The intuitive resistance that some have to this conception of
embodiment is, I feel, in large part because our traditional conceptions of the body
are developed from the deficient modes. Due to the very fact of its transparency, we
pay far less heed to embodiment when we are ‘in flow’ than the scientist does to the
body when it’s on the slab. However, although the deficient modes are
epistemologically misleading, that does not mean that they cannot be instructive.
After all, this thesis is looking specifically at the failed object and the failed body. If
the failed object discloses the referential totality, what does failed embodiment
disclose?
In my view, the failed body’s emergence discloses one’s own limitedness. Of course,
such cases are more complex and nuanced than one can accommodate in a few
introductory remarks. An account of this will be provided in chapter 7, and will be
heavily informed by the preceding chapters’ portrait of Dasein.
1.3 Methodological Remarks
Now that we have in place the key issues that I plan to address, it is time to move to
the methodological considerations. Why do I think that a phenomenology of humour
is in order, as opposed to a theory? What, precisely, differentiates a phenomenological
account of humour from a theory?
The term methodology is perhaps most fitting in the sciences, where the emphasis is
put on the presentation of testable hypotheses that then become developed into
models and theories. With that in mind, I want to look at the theoretical
considerations of Graeme Ritchie, who works in humour theory from a rather
scientific perspective. According to Ritchie, there are two main approaches to the
development of a theory of humour - universalist and descriptive. The aim of the
universalist approach is to ‘devise an extremely general theory which is intended to
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cover all examples within the chosen areas(s) of humour’ (Ritchie 2004:8). In his
view, a universalist theory can fail in three ways - first, in failing to cover all
possibilities; second, covering some data incorrectly; third, being so vague that it
doesn’t make falsifiable predictions. The alternative approach, the descriptive theory,
would be to ‘examine particular types of humour thoroughly, developing detailed
descriptions of [their] workings.’ (Ritchie 2005:8)
The universalist option seems on the face of it to be the soundest way to proceed - if it
is possible to create a ‘general theory of humour’ that could stand up against all
attempts to falsify it, then we could be content in our theory’s scientific rigor.
However, the issue of whether this is possible - even potentially - hinges on an
essentialist notion of humour. That is, the idea that all humour is unified by having a
certain essential characteristic which we can pinpoint as the necessary feature of
humour. In the humour theory tradition, there have been several attempts to provide
an account of what this is, with theories gravitating towards the ‘big three’ of
incongruity, superiority and release.12 However, there is no a priori reason to think
that there is a single essential component of all humour, and the fact that there has
been no resolution in the struggle between the big three suggests that there might not
be.
Instead of there being a single essential feature common to all humour, it seems to me
that a better model would be a Wittgensteinian ‘resemblance’ (Wittgenstein 2001).
Consider what one means when referring to a ‘game’ - some games involved balls,
some games are done seated and some are solitary affairs. There is no one feature
common to all games that we can point to as a marker that a game is being played.
Surely it is the same with humour? There are no necessary and sufficient conditions of
something being humour, but like a game we usually know when we encounter it.
Perhaps, then, a descriptive theory of humour is in order.
1.3.1 ‘10 Types of Theory’
12
These will get a fuller treatment in §2.3 - 2.3
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However, the descriptive paradigm that Ritchie puts forward is still problematic.
Ritchie himself is heavily influenced by his background in computing and linguistics,
which I feel has led him towards a research programme that is fundamentally flawed.
In recent years, Ritchie and his colleagues have worked on the Joking Computer
Project, which attempts to build a computer programme that can tell jokes. By
Ritchie’s own admission, progress in the field of computational humour has been
somewhat slow and they have largely concentrated on perhaps the simplest form of
humour, the pun.
Within the literature, Ritchie draws a distinction between two sorts of pun.
Self-contained puns: These are pieces of text which can be used as humorous
items in a wide variety of circumstances. Any semantic links which they might
have to the context are not directly part of the joke structure, and their only
preconditions for use are general knowledge (of the surrounding culture, etc.)
and a social situation in which joke-making is acceptable.
[Example] What do you get when you cross a murderer with a breakfast food? A
cereal killer.
Contextually integrated puns: This type of pun occurs within some broader
discourse, with the use of a text which, in addition to conveying some
information or emotion, has further linguistic properties which make it a pun
(and may thereby augment the effects of the text, either emotionally,
persuasively or otherwise). Also, the status of the text as a pun may depend on
contextual (possibly non-linguistic) factors…
[Example]: A minor football team known informally as ‘Caley Thistle’ (where
Caley rhymes with alley) soundly defeats Celtic (then the top team in the
country) in a major competition. The next day, a newspaper headline reads:
“Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious”. (Ritchie 2005:126)
The Joking Computer Project, and indeed all attempts at computational humour thus
far, have only been able to achieve the former, self-contained, variety. Whist Ritchie
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seems to believe that this is only indicative of a pragmatic hurdle - that is, progress is
stifled by the complexity of programme required - I want to argue that it is indicative
of a much more fundamental problem. In my view, Ritchie’s computational humour
theory is based on flawed assumptions which means that the project is doomed. These
assumptions get a thoroughly Heideggerean treatment by Hubert Dreyfus (1992), and
the ones I want to refer to are the ontological and epistemological assumptions.
The former, the ‘ontological assumption’ is the assumption that all relevant
information about the world must be analysable in terms of situation-free
determinate elements. In short, that the world is a set of facts each logically
independent of all others. This assumption means that Ritchie construes the problem
of contextually-integrated puns as simply the problem of programming a huge
inventory of facts which would form this context. However, as Dreyfus argues, context
isn’t reducible to prepositions.
A mistake, a collision, an embarrassing situation etc. do not seem on the face of
it to be objects or facts about objects, Even a chair is not understandable in
terms of any set of facts or “elements of knowledge”. To recognise an object as a
chair, for example, means to understand its relation to other objects and to
human beings. This involves a whole context of human activity of which the
shape of our body, the institution of furniture, the inevitability of fatigue
constitute only a small part. And those factors are no more isolatable than is the
chair. They all get their meaning in the context of the human activity of which
they form a part. (Dreyfus 1992:210)
So, it is essential that we understand the chair as belonging to the referential totality
mentioned before. The computer scientist cannot reduce this holism to a set of
propositions about a chair, and this holism is only coherent to a being inside this
world. We know what a chair is because we live in a world in which our legs ache and
we decide to rest, and this relationship cannot be made explicit in purely
propositional terms. Furthermore, linguistic meaning is contextually determined
whilst at the same time contributing to that context. As long as there is some
ambiguity, there is no problem with the totality determining the meaning of each
component. However, if ‘we try to explicate the meaning of a word used in a context,
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then we find ourselves obliged to resolve all the ambiguities in the context. Since the
meaning of each term contributes to the meaning of the context, every word must be
determinate before any word can be made determinate, and we find ourselves
involved in a circle.’ (Dreyfus 1965:71)
Fortunately, we human beings do not find ourselves trapped in a vicious circle when
we want to understand the meaning of a word because we already exist in the world we reside in the very context which Ritchie tries to codify. Our definitions are
adjustable - what we understand by the word ‘near’, for example, depends on the
context we find ourselves in. If you say, ‘stay near to me’ to a child when walking
down a busy street, what qualifies as ‘near’ is very different from what one means
when one says ‘England is near France’. This ambiguity is unproblematic for human
beings - indeed, it is this very ambiguity that is played upon in much verbal humour.
If I say, ‘I used to file my nails, but then I thought ‘what’s the use in keeping them?’’, I
am playing with the ambiguity which proves so problematic for the computer.
This idea leads onto the second - epistemological - assumption. Specifically, that all
knowledge can be formalised and expressed in terms of bits of information and rules.
Let us for the moment assume the rule-following model and posit that joke-making,
like all other intelligent practice, is a case of rule-following. What would it be like if I
had to follow rules in order to make jokes? It seems to me that a lot of jokes are
playful transgressions of the norms that pervade social discourse. If they were to be
formalised into rules, their transgression would have to be governed by meta-rules.
But as they themselves could be transgressed, we would need meta-meta-rules and so
on to a regress that can never end.
The only way to avoid the two regresses outlined is to see that they are indicative of a
paradigm which assumes the two flawed assumptions, and seek an alternative way of
understanding humorous phenomena. To this end, Dreyfus suggests a
Wittgensteinian turn.
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Both Wittgenstein and the computer theorists must agree that there is some
level at which rules are simply applied and one no longer needs rules to guide
their application. Wittgenstein and the AI theorists disagree fundamentally,
however, on how to describe this stopping point. For Wittgenstein there is no
absolute stopping point; we just fill in as many rules as are necessary for the
practical demands of the situation. At some level, depending on what we are
trying to do, the interpretation of the rule is simply evident and the regress
stops...[The problem is that] the computer is not in a situation. It generates no
local context. (Dreyfus 1992:204)
We need to understand that we only develop the capacity to make jokes once we have
developed experientially - once we are beings-in-the-world. There is no reason to
think that this worldhood can, even potentially, be formalised in terms of rules and
propositions. My suggestion is that the failure of Ritchie’s work demonstrates that
humour starts to degrade the moment you try. If one proceeds analytically and views
humour as pieces of information that can be pinned down and dissected, you
effectively ‘deworld’ the phenomena. This is profoundly problematic because in
deworlding the joke, you lose the very thing that makes it intelligible in the first place
- the referential context.
Ritchie is on the right track when he asserts that a descriptive approach is in order,
but my proposal is not in any way ‘theoretical’. What is needed is descriptive
phenomenology which keeps the humour in its native context, using case studies to
frame and focus the inquiry. I will now conclude this chapter with a brief outline of
the forthcoming chapters of this thesis.
1.4 Chapter Outline
Part One - Criticism
The second chapter will look at the current literature in humour theory, including the
aforementioned ‘big three’, as well as Critchley and Carroll - both of whom set out to
build a thoroughly ‘worlded’ account of humour. The third chapter will then turn to
the literature on objects, puppets, animals and the body, indicating where they can be
improved upon in light of Heideggerean phenomenology.
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Part Two - Phenomenology
As mentioned in §1.1.3, part two will be divided into four chapters, each dealing with a
particular strand of my inquiry, before finishing with a conclusion of the thesis as a
whole. Chapter 4 will look specifically at the way in which comic object failure
discloses equipmentality, using as a case study the feature films of Charlie Chaplin.
Chapter 5 will look at anthropomorphic objects, with examples including the short
films of Jan Svankmajer, the puppetry of Blind Summit and the film Lars and the
Real Girl. Chapter 6 will look at anthropomorphic animals, with examples including
Family Guy and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which will then lead on to a discussion of
the disgust that Critchley claims is characteristic of the human becoming animal.
Chapter 7 will look at failed embodiment which, contrasted with the failed object,
discloses one’s own limitedness. I will explore this idea with examples from Beckett’s
Endgame and the stand-up comedy of Francesca Martinez. Chapter 8 will conclude
the thesis with critical reflection of the preceding chapters.
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2. The World
In this chapter, I look at the existing literature on humour,13 and assess the extent to
which my ideas challenge it. The first part broadly deals with the ‘big three’ of
incongruity, release and superiority, and the second part deals with contemporary
attempts at creating a worlded account of humour. Throughout this chapter the
reader should get a stronger sense of where I situate myself amongst the
contemporary debates, as well as a better understanding of where this project is
heading.
2.1 Koestler and Incongruity
As will have hopefully become clear from my discussion of Ritchie’s computational
humour theory, I want to challenge any theory of humour which assumes that world
and/or humour can be reduced to bits of information and rules. I concluded that
Ritchie’s work, by falling foul of the epistemological and ontological assumptions, was
profoundly stunted. I want to turn now to Koestler, who forms an incongruity theory
of humour which on the face of it seems to require at least the rule-following
assumption. However, I want to argue that Koestler’s project is salvageable - indeed, I
am claiming that, ‘recast’ in a Heideggerean light, Koestler lays the foundation for a
very strong account of ‘incongruity’ humour.
According to Koestler, the pattern which underpins incongruity humour is
‘bisociation’ - ‘the perceiving of a situation or idea L in two self-consistent but
habitually incompatible frames of reference, M1 and M2’. (Koestler 1989:35) So, when
I say “I used to file my nails, but then I thought ‘what’s the use in keeping them?’”
There are two meanings of ‘file’, belonging to two contexts - M1, the ‘beautician
context’; and M2, the ‘administrator context’. The two meanings belong to the two
13 At this point it is perhaps advisable for me to define my terms. In my view, humour is an umbrella term which
covers wit, jokes, slapstick, and various other types of phenomena that we might describe as funny. Wit usually has
a connotation of responsiveness to the situation - someone is described as witty if they come up with a humorous
remark ‘on the fly’ (like a comedian’s response to a heckle) but not if they are good at delivering preprepared jokes.
Jokes are characterised by formal properties (e.g. set-up, punchline). I will use the term ‘comedy’ to refer to genre
(along the vein of the traditional comedy/tragedy paradigm).
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contexts which usually do not collide in such a manner - what I mean when I say ‘file’
is unproblematic for the beautician and the administrator as they are already in the
context. As I laboured in my treatment of Ritchie’s work, there is no reason to think
that these contexts can even potentially be codified, and the failure of computational
humour theory suggests that attempts to do so are unlikely to succeed. We don’t need
to codify the context because, for the most part, the meaning is obvious to us. This
obviousness does not preclude ambiguity and error - we can imagine a prolonged
sketch in which a Mr. Bean figure does temp work in both situations ‘with hilarious
consequences’ - but it simply cannot be explained away with an analytic approach.
Now I will turn to an everyday example. At my old family home, we had a table at
which I used to sit drawing, colouring and gluing to my heart’s content. However,
during meal times, I was often told that such activity was inappropriate ‘at the dinner
table’. A pure linguistic analysis might lead one to conclude that my parents had two
tables in that room - a ‘dinner table’ and a ‘play table’ - but due to space constraints
that was not the case. What made gluing an appropriate activity at one point but not
at another was the concrete contexture of activity surrounding it - my father cutting
the chicken, my sister voicing her disdain for parsnips and so on. Even eating there
did not necessitate that it became ‘the dinner table’, as I often snacked whilst gluing
my masterpieces (much to my mother’s distress).
At this point, it might be worth laying out the terminology that Heidegger (1996) uses
so that we can structure our equipmental enquiry. This is given in great detail across
§17-18 of Being and Time, and is summarised concisely by Dreyfus (1997) as follows.
How does the activity of hammering make sense? Equipment makes sense only
in the context of other equipment; our use of equipment makes sense because
our activity has a point. Thus, besides the "in-order-to" that assigns equipment
to an equipmental whole... the use of equipment exhibits a "where-in" (or
practical context), a "with-which" (or item of equipment), a "towards-which" (or
goal), and a "for-the-sake-of-which" (or final point). To take a specific example: I
write on the blackboard in a classroom, with a piece of chalk, in order to draw a
chart, as a step towards explaining Heidegger, for the sake of my being a good
teacher. (Dreyfus 1997:92)
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So, in the case of my dinner-table activity, I scoop my peas at the dinner table
(practical context), with a spoon in-order to eat them for-the-sake of satiating my
hunger.14 In the case of my playtime activity, we could say I glue paper stars at the
‘play table’, with a pritt-stick in-order-to make a birthday card for-the-sake of
showing my affection to my sister on her birthday. Thus, the inappropriateness of
gluing at the dinner table is defined by the contexture of activity surrounding my
doing so. In this way, the table as a site of activity is as flexible in its significance as
the word ‘file’, and as such allows for a similar bisociation and incongruity.
Returning to Koestler, the simplicity of the examples given thus far should not be
taken as an implicit acknowledgement of the limitedness of Koestler’s theory. He
argues well for its applicability in reference to a plethora of comic phenomena, even
extending the theory to complex comic novels and citing Don Quixote as an example
of a ‘humorous narrative [which] oscillates between two frames of reference’ (Koestler
1989:37).
In short, I want to argue that far from challenging the incongruity theory of humour,
the account I plan to put forward can potentially enrich it. However, before moving on
from incongruity, there is a claim which Koestler makes that I want to address more
closely. Specifically, that ‘all coherent thinking is equivalent to playing a game
according to a set of rules’. (Koestler 1989:39) Whilst I addressed rule-following
briefly in the previous chapter, I want to return to it, this time with an eye on its
cognitive component, which I want to claim is the prevailing doctrine tacitly assumed
by Koestler and much of the tradition with which I am dealing.
2.1.1 Know-how, Know-that and the Prevailing Doctrine
In his essay, Knowing How and Knowing That, Gilbert Ryle draws out the ‘prevailing
doctrine’ which he claims has been pervasive in the philosophical tradition from Plato
onwards, and an account of which I think merits quotation at length.
14 Strictly speaking, ‘satiating my hunger’ is not a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ in the Heideggerean sense. This point will
be developed further in §6.2, but for the moment claiming that it is prevents an unnecessary detour at this stage of
the thesis.
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The prevailing doctrine holds… (1) that Intelligence is a special faculty, the
exercises of which are those specific internal acts which are called acts of
thinking, namely the operations of considering propositions; (2) that practical
activities merit their titles ‘intelligent’, ‘clever’ and the rest only because they are
accompanied by some such internal acts of considering propositions (and
particularly ‘regulative’ propositions). That is to say, doing things is never itself
an exercise of intelligence, but is at best a process introduced and somehow
steered by some ulterior act of theorising. (Ryle 2009:222)
This doctrine falls along the faultline of know-how and know-that, with the latter
given primacy, but in my view - following Ryle and Heidegger - know-how needs to be
understood as having ontological primacy over know-that. In Heideggerean terms,
knowledge-that is derivative upon a more fundamental understanding, know-how. To
draw out precisely what I mean by claiming this, let us look at Ryle’s central argument
- a regress which heavily echoes the rule-following argument I made in §1.2.1. Let’s
assume that in order for an act to be classed as ‘intelligent’, it has to be guided by the
mental consideration of maxims. Surely, it is the case that such guiding is itself an
activity which can either be undertaken intelligently or stupidly? If it is, we would
need another set of maxims to guide it, and so on infinitely. In short, the action could
never start.
However, the argument I find more convincing is that such an account does not
correspond to the phenomena I experience. When I go about my business, I do not
find myself spouting rules and maxims to govern my behaviour. The reader might
retort that that it is because I do so on an ‘unconscious’ level, but I am not convinced.
It is certainly the case that I often follow rules when I first learn to do something, but
after I gain a certain level of proficiency, I don’t - I just get on with it. To borrow a line
from Dreyfus (1992), to assume that the rules become ‘unconscious’ after a while is
akin to assuming that the stabilizers on my now-proficient-nephew’s bicycle have
become invisible. Surely it is more phenomenological to say that both rules and
stabilizers are scaffolding that aid in the development of skills, but once superfluous,
they are discarded. It should be noted that proficiency in most motor-tasks, such as
driving a car, playing tennis or mastering the guitar, is marked by a high level of
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automaticity. There does not seem to be any maxim-considering going on, and often it
is very difficult for the sportsman to answer the question of ‘what was going on in his
mind’ directly after the game.
Moreover, most of my skills were never imparted to me in the form of rules15 - indeed,
it is only once one has developed to a certain level of social proficiency that one can be
given propositional rules to follow in the first place. In short, I suggest that the idea
that intelligent behaviour is characterised by (conscious or unconscious) rulefollowing simply does not correspond to the phenomena that we experience in our
everyday lives. In addition to this, such an account leads to a problem of how
intelligent activity starts in the first place.
The prevailing doctrine claims that to act intelligently, is ‘always to do two things;
namely, to consider certain appropriate propositions, or prescriptions, and to put
[them] into practice’. (Ryle 1963:30) We have seen that this is not a very feasible
account of intelligent practice, but where does the temptation to believe this come
from? Like Ryle, I want to claim that the temptation comes from the very way in
which we approach the concept of mind. In the next section, I want to argue that the
phrase ‘in the mind’ - even as it is used in contemporary philosophy of mind - is so
profoundly knotted that it requires substantial disentanglement before it approaches
intelligibility.
2.1.2 Category Mistakes and Ghosts in Machines
I want to start by warding off misunderstanding and making explicit what I am not
claiming. I am not claiming a physicalist viewpoint - that it is possible to reduce
mental activity to physical activity16. I am similarly denying the opposite view idealism, and I am steering clear of dualism to boot. All three options can be viewed
as a pendulum of radical claims, which swings from physicalism to idealism (via
Further discussion on Wittgenstein on rules will follow shortly in §2.1.3
This physicalist viewpoint is currently popular in most analytic philosophy departments, and its rise to
popularity is charted in David Papineau (2001).
15
16
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dualism) ad nauseam.17 I don’t want to position myself anywhere on the pendulum,
because in my view, following Heidegger and Wittgenstein, all options are pseudooptions made to address a pseudo-problem that doesn’t require a solution. As I
mentioned in the previous chapter, I believe that there is no ‘problem of other minds’,
it is rather a knot in our understanding which must be disentangled. To disentangle it,
we need a little jargon - Ryle’s concept of a category mistake - which I will illustrate
with a fictional dialogue.
Ted: Poor Mildred. She came home in a flood of tears.
Bob: What? You said she came home in a Vauxhall Astra earlier!
Ted: She did. What of it?
Bob: Either she came home in a flood of tears or a Vauxhall Astra! Which one was it?
In Rylean terms, Bob has made a category mistake - that is, thinking that ‘coming
home in a flood of tears’ and ‘coming home in a Vauxhall Astra’ refer to the same sort
of thing. This highlights the fact that despite having the same linguistic structure, the
two statements are making very different sorts of claims that cannot be said to be in
any way incompatible. So, I want to argue, it is also the case with the phrases ‘in the
body’ and ‘in the mind’.
Ryle uses the example of a visitor taking a tour around Oxford University. After seeing
all the Colleges, the dormitories and the Registrar’s office, the visitor asks, ‘But where
is the university?’.
[So,] it has to be explained to him that the University is not a collateral
institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices
that he has seen. The University is just the way in which what has been seen is
organised (Ryle 1963:18)
Thus it is wrong to talk of the ‘Bodleian Library, the Colleges, the dorms and the
University’, as if the latter referred to an extra member of the same class. Similarly, it
17 This analogy is indebted to Daniel Dennett’s Content and Consciousness, a published version of his doctoral
thesis supervised by Ryle, and as such I feel it is the work with the most tangible Rylean influence. Whilst I admire
Dennett’s aptitude for metaphor I disagree with him on several points, perhaps most notably his views on
phenomenology.
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is misleading to state ‘there are mental processes and physical processes’ in the same
breath, and erroneous to ask ‘how can the mental influence the physical?’. Thus, I
claim, the dualist’s mistake is in thinking that ‘mental processes’ refers to the same
sort of thing as ‘physical processes’, and that it makes sense to conjoin the two.
Rather, I want to claim that ‘mental’ predicates, such as ‘intelligent’ and ‘stupid’ refer
to the manner in which the acts are performed.
As I stated earlier, there is a fundamental distinction which needs to be drawn
between know-how and know-that. Moreover, we need to view know-how as having
primacy over know-that - it is only on the basis of my being-in-the-world that I am
able to gain knowledge-that. This ought not to be a controversial claim - I can only be
taught propositions about the world once I am skilled in the language of my tutor, but
children become proficient at motor-mimicry at a very early stage of development.
This motor mimicry is a potential way to explain how know-how can develop prior to
the ability to comprehend propositional content18 and I want to argue that this
propositional content is derived from the concrete understanding of our know-how. It
is an obvious truism that people were telling jokes before anyone cared to analyse the
practice, and people were reasoning before logic was formalised and written in
textbooks.
My central claim is that when we describe someone as witty, intelligent or cunning,
we are referring to the skillfulness that they demonstrate in their worldly activity.
When we want to assess a person’s intelligence, we don’t need to peer ‘in there’, in the
ghostly realm of ‘her mind’, as we make such judgements based on his concrete
activity ‘out here’ in the world. A common retort to such provocations is to point out
that even if we grant that for the most part our intelligence is a worldly affair, I can
still keep my thoughts to myself. I don’t disagree, but I would say it is a hugely
atypical phenomena and one ought to consider very carefully the nature of this
privacy.
Whilst I think there is potentially an interesting picture to be draw regarding the phylogenesis of worldly
understanding, it is far out of the scope of my enquiry in this thesis. However, it will be touched on briefly in §3.2.1
18
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2.1.3 Remarks on privacy
The trick of talking to oneself in silence is acquired neither quickly nor without
effort; and it is a necessary condition of our acquiring it that we should have
previously learned to talk intelligently aloud and have heard other people doing
so. Keeping our thoughts to ourselves is a sophisticated accomplishment...Yet
many theorists have supposed that the silence in which we have learned to think
is a defining property of thought. (Ryle 1963:28)
As this quotation brings out brilliantly, we first need to learn to ‘think aloud’ before
we can draw this activity into our ‘private quarters’. It is only after we have learned
the language of our world that we can use language in private. Even in these private
moments, we are still out of necessity engaging in a worldly practice. This point is
brought out forcefully by Wittgenstein (2001) in his infamous private language
argument.
Imagine that I set about to create a truly private language, and decide to utilise this
language in reference to a particular sensation. I decide to associate the sign ‘S’ with
the sensation, and every time it occurs I write ‘S’ in a notebook. At first, there seems
to be no problem with such a ‘private language’, but let us consider the nature of this
ostensive definition. Normally, when I point to something and give it a name, I do so
within a specific context. If, when I am talking to my niece, I point out a butterfly that
just flew past the window, there is an inherent ambiguity in my ostensive definition.
What, precisely, assures her that ‘butterfly’ refers to type of animal, rather than the
colour, shape or type of movement? How does she know that the referent lies beyond
the glass pane that is immediately in front of us? This proposition is only coherent by
virtue of its position within a referential context. It might be the case that my
following the movement of the butterfly with my pointing finger indicates that the
object is in motion (ruling out the window as referent), and her familiarity with
‘flying’ rules out the type of movement. As hopefully became clear from my discussion
of Ritchie’s work, I am not convinced it is possible, even potentially, to make the
whole context determinate in terms of explicit propositions. Nonetheless, it must be
noted that my ostensive definition can only be understood within a normative
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practice. Thus, it is quite possible for by niece to reply, ‘I don’t think so, I believe
that’s a moth’.
Returning to the sensation, and the accompanying ‘S’, does this ostensive definition
belong to a normative practice? No, it does not. By virtue of its privacy, my judgement
on this issue is incorrigible. There are no criteria against which my definition can be
refined, improved or challenged. There is no way to distinguish between following a
rule and thinking that you are following a rule. So, whilst it seems that the private
ostensive definition that I give to ‘S’ is of the same nature as the one I give to the
butterfly, it is fundamentally different. In the case of ‘butterfly’, the word is
meaningful by virtue of the role it has in a shared cultural practice, or language game.
There are normative criteria against which usage can be deemed to be correct, and as
a result of this ‘butterfly’ can be rightly said to be meaningful. The case of ‘S’, by
contrast, is characterised by incorrigibility and its privacy divorces it from any
language-game, thus it is not meaningful.
Similarly, let’s suppose that I am a ‘secret comedian’ - I think of routines, but due to
my crippling stage-fright and modesty I never share my material with anyone else.
Now, there is a sense in which the routine is private. But, as my routine is ‘written’ in
English, it is parasitic upon the worldly discourse that I share with my friends and
family. It might even be the case that my sister inspires a chunk of the routine, and
my daily commute inspires another. Thus it is only private in the same sense that it
would be if I were to write it down in an encrypted word document that only I could
look at. Moreover, if I ever wanted to claim that my routine was funny, such
assessment is founded on worldly criteria - the lump of text I have prepared can only
be comical by virtue of the context it is performed in. If I am completely successful in
rendering my routine private, there is no sense in which it can be meaningfully
described as funny or not.
This view of privacy has implications for the nature of mind, which Wittgenstein
draws out with his metaphor of the beetle in a box.
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can
look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by
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looking at his beetle. - Here, it would be quite possible for everyone to have
something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly
changing. - But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?
If so, it wouldn’t be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no
place in the language-game at all, not even as a something: for the box might be
empty. No, one can even ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out,
whatever it is. (Wittgenstein 2001:85)
Thus, I would claim that the idea that the word ‘mind’ refers to private inner space is
problematic, and we need to understand mental predicates as not ‘pointing inwards’
to this occult space, but rather as part of a shared discursive practice. When we
describe the chess player’s intelligence, this predicate does not point to the ‘interior
space of the mind’ (which by definition cannot be observed), but rather describes his
actions with respect to normative criteria ‘out here’. Roughly, that he makes good
moves and is quick to take advantage of the mistakes of his opponents, and in doing
so demonstrates an understanding more fundamental than the spouting of maxims
and rules.
2.1.4 Mind Reconsidered
In conclusion, ‘mind’ refers neither to a place nor an occult entity that haunts my
physical body, but rather it is a reification of the know-how which underpins my
being-in-the-world. When we talk about intelligent behaviour, we are referring first
and foremost to the skill with which the action is performed. This action is deemed
‘skillful’ by virtue of worldly normative criteria, which are occasionally crystallised in
the form of propositional rules. However, for the most part these criteria remain
unarticulated, and are dynamic and adjustable.
The privacy of thought often taken to be a hallmark of ‘the mind’ is in fact an
achievement we only develop on the foundations of the more fundamental worldly
activity with which we engage. It is possible for me to keep my amusement and my
comedy-routines to myself, but the former requires great effort and the latter
precludes it from being funny or unfunny. In both cases, any privacy we may achieve
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does not take away from the fact that we are still dealing with essentially worldly
phenomena. In short, cognition is derivative of the more primordial understanding
(know-how) characteristic of our being-in-the-world. Moreover, I would like to
challenge any descriptive paradigm that construes the phrase ‘in the mind’ as being in
opposition to ‘in the world’.
In the next section, I will turn my attention to the humour theory of Freud, which
ostensibly requires understanding the mind as occult entity. Now that we have
established the problems arising from the assumption that mental predicates point
‘inwards’, I will try to draw out an alternative (Wittgensteinian) reading of Freud
which insists on its status as ‘further descriptions’ and as such has a deeper
compatibility with the phenomenological project at hand.
2.2 Freud, Release and the Psychology of Humour
In Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, there is undoubtedly a
reliance on the idea of the mind as a ghostly realm. As such, it might seem initially
that my account puts me directly at odds with Freud’s famous musings on the matter.
However, as with Koestler, I want to argue that some of the key insights Freud makes
are valid, and moreover they can be demonstrably enriched by the account I am
putting forward.
Freud’s account of jokes builds on the foundations of a very straightforward
distinction - on the one hand there are innocent jokes, on the other are ‘tendentious’
jokes, or what a Channel 4 programmer might call ‘edgy material’. Edgy material can
be subdivided into smutty and aggressive jokes, and will be the starting point of this
enquiry. Let us look at Freud’s central claim regarding smutty material.
[Jokes] make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile)
in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way. They circumvent this obstacle
and in that way draw pleasure from a source which the obstacle has made
inaccessible. The obstacle standing in the way is in reality nothing other than
women's incapacity to tolerate undisguised sexuality. (Freud 1978:144)
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So, the idea is that we normally cannot be overtly aggressive or sexual due to social
constraints, but in the tendentious joke we can express such intent in a socially
acceptable way. Whilst I take issue with his couching his claims in heteronormative
language that simplistically equates masculinity with dominance and femininity with
submissiveness, it’s hard to deny that there are taboos surrounding explicit
aggressiveness or ‘undisguised sexuality’. If I were to give a paper at a conference, I
wouldn’t think very highly of a keynote speaker who shouted aggressive or smutty
comments, and I would probably refrain from doing so when he was at the lectern.
Given the relationship that I uphold between the appropriateness of certain activity
and its referential context, the precise nature of this inappropriateness can in
principle be elucidated with phenomenology. However, Freud moves on from making
benign claims about social conduct, about which I find it difficult to disagree, to claim
that there is a correlation between the pleasure we get from smutty jokes and the
‘psychical expenditure that is saved’. (Freud 1978:167) This sleight of hand forms the
crux of his ‘psychogenetic account’.
The central notion that seems to underpin his theory of psychogenesis is that we
internalise social taboos, with the effect being that our very lusty and aggressive
tendencies build up. The effect of the joke, then, is akin to the release that one gets
from visiting the lavatory after queuing for twenty minutes. At this point it is
important to note that this ‘relief theory’ does not originate with Freud,19 but he
remains its most persuasive advocate.
What, precisely, is Freud trying to put forward? Is it a scientific theory, descriptive
theory or an attempt at phenomenology? This question matters because it determines
the criteria against which we assess his claims. Let us for the moment assume that
Freud is attempting a scientific theory of humour. It seems then that the appropriate
criterion we should have in mind is that of falsification. A clear illustration of this
process is the slightly glib account Richard Feynman gives of the process of finding
physical laws.
Morreall (1987) gives a good overview of much of the historical work on the three main theories of humour, and
Freud sits alongside Spencer as one of the most notable proponents of the release theory.
19
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First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what
would be implied if [we are]... right. Then we compare the result of the
computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with
observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.
(Feynman 1985:156)
So, on this account, first you have a theory, then you work out what it would be like if
your theory was correct and you test it to see if you are right. Usually a series of
experiments support the theory and then it builds into the consensus view. It is
integral that alongside the theory are concrete predictions that we can potentially
explore to falsify the theory. Now, can we claim that Freud presents a ‘theory’ in this
sense? This issue lies at the heart of Cioffi’s book, Freud and the Question of
Pseudoscience, in which he tries to address the issue of falsifiability with regard to
Freud. Let us look at a section of Freud’s theory with which most people are familiar,
the Oedipus complex. What precisely would count as disproof of this hypothesis?
Escolona highlights the difficulties by giving the example of an ‘experiment’ in which
a father sends his son to bed.
If, to substantiate the core of the oedipal hypothesis, the child were to display a
frank anger against his father, or frank possessiveness towards his mother,
things would be reasonably simple. However, no one would seriously believe
that oedipal conflicts were only at play when the child obligingly acts out his
wish and anger...Instead, we assume that the child tends to defend himself from
becoming
aware of - or openly reflecting - aggression because it engenders
anxiety. Thus, if the child gives daddy a goodnight hug and insists that he, rather
than mummy tuck him in, this behaviour may also confirm the original
hypothesis. (Escolona, in Cioffi 1998a:217)
So, the hypothesis entails that if a child is sent to his bedroom, either he will respond
with anger and/or possessiveness towards his mother, or he will not. In fact, it is not
clear to me what precisely could disprove the hypothesis at hand. Similarly, Freud’s
theory of humour does not make predictions from which we can attempt to falsify or
verify it. So, Freud’s theory is not of the same sort that Feynman was interested in - it
is not a ‘scientific’ theory. Whereas it is possible to falsify the hypothesis ‘sound is
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faster than light’ with a simple experiment or the observation of thunder and
lightning, the same cannot be said of much of what Freud puts forward. Of course,
this does not preclude its validity. Rather, we need a different set of criteria against
which to assess his claims. To that end, I want to turn to Wittgenstein who, as Cioffi
puts it, doesn’t demand Freud’s theory ‘live up to its scientific pretensions, but
[rather] that it abandons it.’ (Cioffi 1998a:286)
The central point that Wittgenstein (1967) makes about Freud’s work on humour is
that whereas Freud seems to think that he is drawing up a causal explanation of the
phenomenon, he is actually providing us with further, metaphorical, descriptions of
it. So, the criteria against which to assess Freud’s claims are the extent to which we
want to say ‘yes, it is a bit like that’. This more metaphorical reading of Freud is, in my
view, much more palatable. Consider what he says about the id, ego and superego. It
is rather charming to imagine that there are three little homunculi battling out, and
sometimes when I might say I feel conflicted we can imagine the little guys wrestling
over the ‘make that joke about the keynote speaker’ button.
In this framework, it might be illuminating to think of the relief that I get when
someone ‘breaks the tension’ with a joke. You can imagine a little dam of psychical
energy breaking as a rather cartoony illustration, and one might well assent to that
description. Crucially, I don’t think that this reading of Freud conflicts or undermines
my phenomenological enterprise. When we are tempted to make a lewd comment,
even if we imagine that our decision to refrain is like having a little man in our head
vetoing, all that means is that we are imagining that there is a little man who also
knows it is inappropriate, which doesn’t get to the heart of the ‘why’ question. If it is
inappropriate for me to shout lewd or aggressive comments at the keynote speaker,
that is a restriction of the concrete situation in which I find myself and, as I claimed
earlier, such inappropriateness is best elucidated with recourse to phenomenology
rather than the hypotheses of psychoanalysis.
Freud claims that an essential condition of successful joke-telling is that the listener
‘should be in sufficient psychical accord with the... [the teller] to possess the same
inhibitions, which the joke-work has overcome.’ (Freud 1978:203). So, in his view
there needs to be a strong correlation between the inhibitions of the teller and the
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inhibitions of the listener in order for the joke to be successful. If it were not the case
that this is a ‘further description’ of the most fundamental way in which I am in the
world with others, it seems that there needs to be a mystical connection between the
two ‘inner worlds’ of joke-teller and joke-maker. I am personally of the opinion that
there is no need to posit such a mystical connection, as we are fundamentally in the
world with others, and the accord that Freud identifies can be understood as an
essentially worldly phenomena. In this way, it is possible to accommodate it within a
phenomenological paradigm.
Imagine a group of people at the cinema during the war, and just before a Chaplin
movie started there was a news reel informing the patrons of the latest news
regarding the war effort. It is quite probable that most of the people in the auditorium
had a loved one fighting, and so the tension in the room would be almost unbearable.
It is, in such circumstances, quite fitting to discuss the release of tension that the
patrons experience when the Tramp makes his first blunder. Of course, there is a
sense in which each person’s feelings are their own - one woman’s relationship with
her husband is quite different from another’s - but nonetheless, there is a
communality in this phenomenon which I think you can only accommodate with
worlded phenomenology. Furthermore, this sociality is fundamental to the
phenomenon of humour. It is only very recently - due to technological developments that one has been able to enjoy the films of Chaplin in private, and I must confess that
I much prefer watching them with friends.
Oliver Double challenges the ‘radical subjectivity’ often attributed to humour by
making the point that if it were the case then a comedy gig would entail different
pockets of audience laughing at different times, with a particularly successful gig
being one in which each section laughs at least once. (Double 1997:254) This is, of
course, not the case. Indeed, the sociality of the comedy club can often augment the
effect of a gag that would only make us smile in other circumstances. I have no
problem with Freud’s theory insofar as it is interpreted metaphorically, but if it is not
then we are left with a puzzle of how some comedians playing large gigs are so
successful at traversing the gulfs necessarily separating 200 individual psyches. Freud
acknowledges that they need to be in ‘psychical accord' but I am unaware of the
precise details of how I, as a performer, would go about achieving this.
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2.3 Remarks on Superiority
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, incongruity, release and superiority are the
three main theories that have dominated the literature on humour. I have dealt with
incongruity and release in a little detail, so now it is time for me to remark on
superiority. I find the notion that there is usually a ‘butt of the joke’ fairly
uncontroversial. Most cultures have a minority that forms the shorthand for stupid
outsider - ‘in many French jokes, Belgians are depicted as witless underdogs; in the
United States the imbeciles are the Poles; and their place is taken by the Portuguese in
Brazil and the Irish in England.’ (Chiaro 1992:78) As hopefully became clear in the
discussion of ‘mental predicates’, I want to uphold that the notion of stupidity is
founded upon normative worldly criteria which can only be elucidated by worlded
phenomenology, the foundations of which I hope will be set out in this thesis.
I would like to acknowledge that superiority and incongruity are both found in some
humour, but deny that either is a necessary and sufficient condition for something
being humorous. Using the family resemblances model, I don’t believe I need to
pinpoint what such a condition could be, and I am doubtful that such a condition
exists. My central claim in the remainder of this thesis is that all humour, including
racist humour, sexual humour and simple puns, need to be understood in terms of its
‘hermeneutic conditions’. By this, I mean that there are certain conditions of
humour’s intelligibility, and in my view this is the phenomenon of world. Thus, the
task of the remaining section of this chapter is to look at how the phenomenon of
world is treated in existing accounts of humour, and the remainder of this thesis will
draw out my own account accommodating world as a hermeneutic condition.
2.4 Critchley’s World
Humour does not redeem us from this world, but returns us to it ineluctably by
showing that there is no alternative. The consolations of humour come in
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acknowledging that this is the only world and, imperfect as it is and we are, it is
only here that we can make a difference. (Critchley 2002:17)
On this key point, I am in agreement with Critchley. Part of the reason I object so
strongly to the deworlding of the humorous phenomena is that I believe that the key
to understanding humour lies in accommodating the way in which it returns us
ineluctably to the world. Indeed, the project of this thesis is predicated on the idea
that object failure has the power to disclose the world to us, and morphic humour has
the power to make clear what distinguishes Dasein’s being-in-the world from the
world-poor animal on the one hand, and the worldless stone on the other. In this
section I want to take a critical look at Critchley’s On Humour, which in many ways
lays the foundations for the project ahead. In highlighting the areas in which my views
diverge with Critchley’s it is my hope, that by the end of this chapter, the reader will
have my position firmly in sight.
Critchley begins by stating that ‘in listening to a joke, I am presupposing a social
world which is shared, the forms of which the practice of joke-telling is going to play
with.’ (Critchley 2002:4) This point emphasizes the concrete situation that both joketeller and listener have to share in order for the joke-making to get off the ground. He
explicitly claims that this situatedness does not preclude transgression - indeed, he
wants to claim that the mocking of power exposes its contingency. This sort of
humour he describes as ‘true’ humour, but I want to steer clear of such value claims.
At this point, I am only interested in the phenomena, and any judgements I make
about ethics, politics or authenticity will come only once the phenomenological
terrain has been thoroughly mapped.
2.4.1 Animals Being Humanlike
Critchley asserts that whilst we cannot know for certain that animals don’t have a
sense of humour, we can be sure that humour is an anthropological constant - that is,
all human beings have humour. Let us look at the first claim - what basis does
Critchley give for asserting that animal humour is beyond our epistemic limits? For
the most part it seems to reside in the often quoted Wittgenstein line, ‘if a lion could
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talk, then we would not understand him’. (Critchley 2002:29). But an off-the-cuff
quotation of such an opaque passage could perhaps be described as a little glib. At the
very least, I feel the passage requires some unpacking. My reading of this is that we
speak as we do because of what we do - or more precisely because of the world in
which we exist. What is at stake is our very being-in-the-world. If the lion spoke to me
in perfect English, I could be sure of the similarity in the worlds we share. But it
doesn’t, so I can’t. Here I am making the soft claim that lions can’t speak English, but
I also want to make the case that lions are without language.
This claim might seem a little presumptuous - after all, I can’t ‘peer into the lions
mind’ to make sure. But that rather begs the question, as what is at stake is the very
intelligibility of the lion having ‘a mind’ in the first place. In order for a lion to have an
‘internal monologue’, I want to claim, there needs first to be an external one. I do not
deny that the scents and roars of the animal kingdom are like a language, in the same
way that body language is a ‘sort of language’, and yes - I am fully aware that we have
managed to teach a few other primates some rudimentary sign language. But that’s
not what is at stake. I want to discuss the sort of language with which one can point
out a bug and discuss whether it is a moth or butterfly. This is unique to Dasein, a
being-in-the-world.
As Daniel Dennett rightly points out, ‘it sometimes seems that the highest praise we
can bestow on a phenomenon we are studying is the claim that its complexities entitle
it to be called a language-of sorts.’ (Dennett 1994) The question of whether animals
have speech patterns at the level of complexity which we Homo sapiens enjoy is an
empirical matter, and there seems to be a broad consensus that the answer is no.20 I
want to refrain from delving into the developmental prerequisites of complex
language, as we must not lose sight of the fact I am trying to make an ontological
distinction. Animal being and Dasein’s being-in-the-world are ontologically distinct,
with the former being marked by worldhood poverty. Whilst a full discussion of
precisely what this means will be deferred until later on in this thesis,21 such a
clarification was required to distinguish my claim about animality from Critchley’s,
20
21
Provine (2001) touches on this a little bit.
Specifically, in §3.1 and §6.2 - 6.4
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who seems content to rely on a commonsense conception of animality. Let us now
turn to the central claim Critchley makes about animality and humour.
When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh
out loud...But when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting and if
we laugh at all then it is what Beckett calls the ‘mirthless laugh’, which laughs at
that which is unhappy. (Critchley 2002:33)
It seems to me that Critchley extrapolates a general maxim from a couple of examples
from literature and then applies it to all animal morphism. However, I’m not
convinced that even this simple maxim holds true to all cases. In the former case - the
animal becoming human - consider the final passage of Animal Farm, when the pigs
have become so human like it’s hard to tell man and pig apart. This is a clear example
of animal-becoming-human being disgusting.
Regarding the human becoming animal, Critchley expands a little to explain that the
humour resides in the fact that ‘humans show themselves to be useless animals’.
(Critchley 2002:34) However, is this the case with Bottom from a Midsummer Night’s
Dream? I would claim that, far from being an incompetent animal, he is actually a
rather good one. After his transformation, he changes very little in character but
because of his prior ‘asinine’ ways, he proves quite adept at being a beast. These
counterexamples undermine the universality that Critchley seems to hold of his
maxims, and as such I would like to suggest that perhaps maxims are not the way
forward. It is surprising to find that, despite his predilection for phenomenology, he
tries to shortcut the phenomenological approach. By focussing exclusively on literary
examples, I feel he does the phenomena a disservice. What is required is an account of
the everyday way in which animals are amongst us, and how this changes in their
‘becoming more human’. In my view, such a subtle ontological shift is best described
by observing performance rather than with literary analysis.
2.4.2 Object Morphism
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As Critchley rightly observes, alongside Freud, Bergson stands as one of the most
influential theorists of humour. It might seem perhaps a little strange, then, that I
have not bestowed him with a section of his own. However, due to his influence on
Critchley and Carroll, I have decided to spread my treatment of his theory across my
account of those two thinkers.
The first thing that must be noted about Bergson is that his theory of the comic has
fortunately outlived the vitalism which formed its foundations. As Julian Huxley
observed, such vitalism is ‘tantamount to explaining that a railway engine [is]
propelled by élan locomotif’ (Dawkins 2006). The central notion underpinning
Bergson’s thesis is that ‘we laugh every time a person gives us the illusion of being a
thing.’ (Bergson 1980:28) But in lieu of the vitalist conception given to us by Bergson,
what should we understand by the term ‘thing’? The idea that seems to underpin
Bergson and Critchley’s understanding is the mechanical - with a particular emphasis
being placed on rigidity and repetition. Critchley uses the moment in Chaplin’s
Modern Times when the tramp becomes like an automaton as an illustration of this
point. However, Critchley goes on to problematise the simplicity of Bergson’s picture,
and asks ‘do we not also laugh when a thing gives us the impression of a being
person?’ (Critchley 2002:58).
So according to Critchley, both the thing seeming human-like and the human seeming
thing-like can sometimes be comical. However, what Critchley fails to do, which I
believe is necessary for getting the phenomenology right, is define precisely the nature
of the thing. To that end, I want to refer you back to a claim that I made in the
introduction - the ready-to-hand scissors are not ‘things’ with isolable properties, but
rather they form a ‘referential totality’ in which the scissors, the paper and the desk all
relate to one another. The nature of the object can only be intelligible by virtue of the
referential totality and a whole context of human activity. This is not fully
encapsulated in the notion of the mechanical - that would not, for example, include a
sirloin steak.22 Moreover, we need to distinguish between the ready-to-hand object
and the reified state of the ‘thing’ (what Heidegger calls the present-at-hand).
22
And so, by extension, would not be suited to account for the anthropomorphism of Svankmajer’s Meat Love.
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As a reified thing, the object is divorced from its native activity and, by virtue of this,
loses its meaning (a process Heidegger calls deworlding). This is illustrated perfectly
by an article in the mock-newspaper The Onion (2010) which ran with the headline
‘U.S. Economy Grinds to a Halt as Nation Realizes Money Just a Symbolic, Mutually
Shared Illusion’. In this article, the ‘reporter’ describes how the shared practice of
money exchange collapses as people realise that the coins and paper circulating don’t
have intrinsic value, with President Obama muttering “it’s just metal, it’s just metal”.
This technique, of removing things from their context, is well-used in observational
comedy, and should not be conflated with the other deficient modality - the ‘unreadyto-hand’, which will be dealt with at length shortly.
So, I want to argue that Critchley’s account of object-morphism is insufficient
because, as in the case with animal morphism, he does not tease out the ontological
distinction. We need to understand that in the case of morphism, we have three
distinct ontological categories - the world-poor animal, the world-forming man, and
the worldless object.
2.4.3 Searching High and Low for Exemplary Phenomena (Detour)
Notwithstanding the criticisms above, there are many aspects of Simon Critchley’s On
Humour that I find thoroughly commendable – it is a piece of considered philosophy that
takes humour seriously and it addresses many of the areas that I personally find very
interesting. Moreover, it is ostensibly targeted towards a popular audience. However, there
was one aspect that Oliver Double picks up on which has always made me a little uneasy.
The theory and the highbrow sources get treated with respect, whereas the few
examples of popular comedy are treated fairly shoddily. On p.21, for example,
Critchley cites seven gags. Whereas Freud’s and Sterne’s work are worthy of a
proper citation, with full publication details being given in an endnote, here the
only information we’re given is that the gags are ‘From various Marx Brothers’
scripts, Peter Chelsom’s wonderful 1994 film Funny Bones, and Samuel
Beckett’s Endgame (Faber, London, 1958).’ So apparently, Beckett’s worthy of
full publication details (although oddly, not a page reference), Chelsom’s film at
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least gets named, but the poor old Marx Brothers aren’t worth bothering with –
in spite of being some of the few professional comedians mentioned in the
book. (Double 2010)
Whilst Double is quick to admit that Critchley is by no means alone in this (probably
completely unconscious) attitude towards popular culture, it is perhaps more
conspicuous in a book on humour. As Critchley openly acknowledges, humour is
universal and although he does pick out what he believes to be ‘true’ humour, this
does not in any clear sense fall along a faultline of high/popular culture. The fact that
he is citing the Marx Brothers at all is undoubtedly a sign of progress, as is the rising
number of academics interested in popular entertainment such as clown, stand-up
and puppetry. Regardless, I think that there needs to be a more conscious effort to
integrate them more into the discourse around humour. Even if the stand-up comedy
of, say, Rhod Gilbert, is less aesthetically valuable than the plays of Samuel Beckett
then that does not preclude them from being as humorous (or even more so). As such,
in a work on humour I personally see no grounds for such distinctions between the
two. It is for this reason that I have decided to use examples from a wide variety of
comic performance and films – from high to low culture including Beckett, stand-up
comedy and puppetry.
2.5 Carroll on Bergson and Skillful Coping
In the discussion of Garner’s conception of phenomenology in §1.1.1, I was rather
critical of his interpretation, and I personally find it rather unfortunate that it seems
to be the most pervasive understanding of phenomenology within the performance
studies literature. Even in Shepherd and Wallis’ authoritative
Drama/Theatre/Performance this seems to be the main definition of
phenomenology. (Indeed, the authors quote the Garner passage that I have
challenged). As I tried to make clear, I do not consider this thesis to be a ‘description
of subjective experience’, and as such it is markedly different to the ‘phenomenology
of either Garner or Bert O. States. The closest thing to a hermeneutic phenomenology
of humour that I have encountered within the literature is Noël Carroll’s book,
Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor and Bodily Coping. Although it
is more a sustained phenomenology of Keaton’s film The General rather than of
humour generally, I think is a very good exploration of the possibilities. In the
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introduction to this book, a recently published version of his doctoral thesis, he
suggests that his broadly phenomenological approach was a result of a strong
opposition to the prevailing ‘literary’ trend within film studies in the seventies. The
link with philosophical phenomenology – and the book’s connections with my ideas –
is brought out forcefully in the following passage.
Perhaps recalling Heidegger’s insight that the breakdown of the tool throws the
entire system of equipment of which it is a part into the spotlight, MerleauPonty also looks to cases of where breakdowns – in his case, bodily ones –
occurred as a way of discerning how the system works in the normal course of
events. Malfunctioning people, that is, make what is involved in normal
functioning clearly manifest where it might otherwise remain invisible. Likewise,
I believe that the physical disasters that beset the Keaton character in The
General underline the standard of bodily intelligence by falling so far short of it.
And, in addition, Keaton also limns what is involved in bodily intelligence by
surpassing it to a surprising degree. (Carroll 2009:6)
Importantly, Carroll goes further than Critchley in acknowledging the ready-to-hand
modality, and develops an account of Buster Keaton’s work that combines Bergson’s
account with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Carroll claims that there is ‘a
uniquely bodily species of understanding involved in the process of our dealings with
physical objects’ (Carroll 2009:5), and that this is the central theme of Keaton’s work.
This notion of intelligence contrasts with intellectualist conceptions of
‘knowledgeability’ (know-that), and is deeply congruent with the conception of
understanding I want to draw out. This understanding does not reside in calling to
mind propositions or maxims to guide behaviour, but rather in responding
organically to the specific demands of the situation. This prereflexive understanding
requires an adaptability - for example, if you are driving and someone pulls out in
front of you, you swerve to avoid them or hit the breaks.
Failures in adaptability, Carroll argues, are what underpins much of Keaton’s
humour. As an example, Carroll uses the scene from The General in which Johnny
Gray sits on the driverod connecting a steam train’s wheels. Gray is so upset (due to
events directly preceding) that he does not even notice when the train starts moving.
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His failure is a lack of attention to the concrete situation. At times, Carroll states,
‘Johnny seems to elevate carelessness into a state of being.’ (Carroll 2009:43)
In this way, Carroll draws an account of comic inattentiveness which supports the
non-cognitivist framework I am pursuing. The ‘mechanical’ behaviour that Bergson
suggests is at the heart of much comic performance is a failure in the prereflexive
understanding necessary for our going about our business. However, Carroll also
makes the point that the opposite - successful adaptation - can sometimes be comical.
When Johnny is chopping wood…[he] breaks his ax handle. He desperately
needs wood for his engine. He looks forlornly at the broken handle, but only for
a second, because, all of a sudden, he realizes that the handle is wood, the very
thing he needs to stoke his engine. He dutifully carries this newly discovered
piece of kindling to the furnace. Here... the character must shed a characteristic
way of thinking. He must stop thinking of the handle-as-handle to thinking of it
as wood. (Carroll 2009:53)
This adaptation is interesting from my perspective because it touches on readiness-tohand - Johnny relates to the handle as a handle up to, and slightly after, the point of
failure. But this failure causes him to ‘rethink’ the object. Where most people would
try to fix it or search for another axe, Johnny adapts to the situation in a novel way
that transgresses this equipmentality. This highlights the fact that primarily and for
the most part, we do not think of the handle as a lump of wood and then tack its
function onto that ‘brute property’, but rather our most fundamental understanding
of the axe is in terms of the referential context. Recalling our earlier discussion, I
might cut the wood in the engine room with an axe, in order to stoke the fire, as a step
towards keeping the engine going for the sake of getting back to London in good
time. This is the fundamental structure of our activity and when the axe fails we
suddenly become aware of this fact.
Before moving from Carroll and returning to Critchley, I want to look at a claim that
he makes about how Chaplin’s relationship with objects differs from Keaton’s.
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Chaplin does not use objects in the same way that Keaton does. He transforms
them into other things. Chaplin’s prowess is as a mime. He treats objects
metaphorically. A famous example of this is the boot and shoestrings in the
Thanksgiving scene of The Gold Rush. Here the boot becomes a turkey, nails
become bones, and the leather laces become spaghetti through Chaplin’s
treatment of them. (Carroll 2009:56)
I would argue that Chaplin’s shoe-eating and Keaton’s handle-burning are actually
rather similar. Both are ingenious adaptations to a less than ideal situation, and they
both ‘re-imagine’ the object in a way which is in some way transgressive. The shoes
and handle still relate to their native referential context - shoes, feet and walking in
the former; axe, wood and fire-stoking in the latter - but what is different between the
two cases is the imaginativeness of the transgression. The handle stays within the
referential context of fire-stoking, but the shoe moves into the slightly more novel one
of thanksgiving dinner.
2.6 The World in our Sights
Finally, we have worldhood in our sights. I want to claim that the referential totality
which Chaplinesque transgressions disclose are an essential feature of worldhood. It
is only for the human that the hammer can be ‘ready-to-hand’ and only Dasein has an
understanding of being. This understanding is not intellectual, and has more in
common with know-how than know-that. It is the understanding that we all
demonstrate in our responding prereflexively to the concrete situation in which we
find ourselves.
To return to the question of language, I claim that animals are without language
precisely because of the way in which it features within the world. When I say ‘Johnny
sat at the table’, the phrase highlights Johnny’s understanding of the referential
context of tables, cutlery and the practice of eating. To say that the caged parakeet
‘sits at the table’ is erroneous - it smuggles a little of our understanding into an
account of something which does not warrant it. Language, understanding and world
are deeply intertwined, and just as the parakeet cannot sit at the table in the same way
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I do, it is not possible for him to entertain propositions about that fact. If he were to
speak as we do, and sit with us, then he would be Dasein, unlike his mute avian
brethren. Such an ontological shift will be explored in chapter six.
2.6.1 A Dark Detour
To recap over the terrain covered thus far, I want to argue that anthropic animals and
objects are ‘humanlike’ not by virtue of looking like a human, but rather by
demonstrating the sort of being-in-the-world that is the hallmark of the human being
(Dasein). The anthropic animal might ‘sit up the dinner table’ with me, and perhaps
chat with me about his day. By virtue of objects being handy and/or his engaging in
discourse, it is right to say that he is in the world with us. Furthermore, I want to
argue that in object failure or Chaplinesque transgressions, the referential context
becomes disclosed to us - the fundamental structure that underpins our everyday
understanding of our world becomes salient. It might seem that it is time for us to
move on to the bodily failure, but before we do I want to pick up on a theme in
Critchley which is tangential from the crux of this project. However, it is my hope that
by the end of this section the reader will see the utility in such a detour.
2.6.2 Critchley on Humour Noir
In the concluding chapter of On Humour, Critchley ends up making a rather strange
Freudian turn. He begins by looking at Freud’s consideration of dark humour. ‘Freud
speaks of a criminal who, on the morning of his execution, is being led out to the
gallows to be hanged, and who remarks, looking up at the sky…‘Well, the week’s
beginning nicely.’’ (Critchley 2002:94) According to Critchley, this phenomena
requires a Freudian framework to be understood. Specifically, he draws on Freud’s
work on melancholy, where there is a split between ego and super-ego, with the latter
standing over the former in cruel denigration. He then develops an account of a
matured super-ego - what he calls the super-ego II, which I feel merits quotation at
length.
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My claim is that, on the one hand, humour makes the super-ego a less severe
master, permitting a maturation of the super-ego function that can have
extremely salutary effects. On the other hand, I think that ‘super-ego II’ is what
takes the place of the ego ideal; and all the fantasies of primary narcissism...
Finally, perhaps it is the super-ego that saves the human being from tragic
hybris, from the Promethean fantasy of believing oneself to be omnipotent, and
it does this through humour. (Critchley 2002:104)
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is not phenomenology. Moreover, I’m not sure
that this proliferation of homunculi really does much work in explaining the
criminal’s dark last words. It simply defers the issue down a chain of command ‘from what am I laughing at?’ to ‘what is the super-ego II laughing at?’. Finally we get
an answer- it’s an acknowledgement that we are not omnipotent - which I don’t think
requires a team of mini-mes. I suspect most of us have moments of acute realisation
that we are limited in our capabilities. However, I want to claim that exploring such
an acknowledgement does not require a psychological analytic, but an existential one.
I would go further to state that in such moments, we are capable of grasping this
limitedness either authentically or inauthentically. To illustrate this, I want to quote
Jennan Ismael’s lecture on death, specifically a passage in which she describes one
way of responding to the fact of our finitude. It should be noted, it is an account with
which she disagrees, but which I feel illustrates a popular ‘absurd’ response.
We live our lives with the most intense concern, treating ourselves and the
choices that we make as though they matter. As though something hinges on
them. But - and the sentiment continues - all of our schemes are like paths
leading nowhere, life is no different than jumping off the Empire State Building
except that it takes a longer time to hit the ground. (Ismael 2006)
The idea underpinning this sentiment is that in the face of our finitude, we realise that
life is meaningless - it has no intrinsic meaning and our projects are just things that
keep us busy until the moment we ‘hit the ground’. Like Ismael (and Heidegger), I
disagree with this sentiment, but I think it is a common stance in dark humour which
is worth exploring. Indeed, I would claim that it is a feature which resonates through
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much of Beckett’s ‘mirthless laughter’, and this mirthless laughter features heavily in
Critchley’s treatment of humour.23
In order to account for this stance, let me recall a claim that I made about the presentat-hand object. In the case of the coin held by President Obama in The Onion’s article,
it does seem to lose its meaning - ‘it’s just metal, it’s just metal’. This, I argued, is
because it is deworlded, and the realisation behind the president’s distress is that the
coin does not have any intrinsic meaning. The coin is valuable by virtue of the role it
plays in the contexture of human activity with which it forms a part. The present-athand modality, by deworlding the phenomena, has the potential to make the familiar
strange, perhaps even meaningless. This is what is happening in Ismael’s example,
but it is not the only response, and it could perhaps be described as an inauthentic
one.
If this response to death is inauthentic, then does this mean that one should
discourage it, or even seek an alternative way to respond to dark comedy? First, it
should be noted that the claim of authenticity is not a moral claim - as I keep pressing,
I am not trying to set out an ethics of humour. That some humour works by peddling
the present-at-hand to make life seem absurd is no more questionable than the
observation that the stand-up does the same in observational comedy, albeit with less
existentially loaded phenomena. Secondly, the response Critchley gives does seem to
suggest that authentic laughter isn’t possible, or at least that our limitedness calls not
for ‘Promethean authenticity but a laughable inauthenticity.’ (Critchley 2002:102) On
this point I disagree with Critchley, and I will argue this at length in §7.2.2, but for the
moment I think we should leave this to one side. In the next section, I want to draw
out what Heidegger described as the authentic mode, Being-towards-death, so that we
can have a handle on what precisely it might mean for the animal or object to be
anthropic with its relation to its finitude.
2.6.3 Heidegger on Death
23
An existential analytic of Beckett’s Endgame will be developed in §7.2
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Heidegger begins his account of Being-towards-death by looking at the possibility of
grasping Dasein as Being-a-whole. The problem with Dasein, according to Heidegger,
is that its grasping itself as a totality seems to imply a contradiction; as long as Dasein
exists, it is incomplete, and in order for Dasein to be complete, it must be no longer.
(Heidegger 1996:280) In other words, from birth Dasein is Being-towards-itspossibilities, and seeing as how death is a possibility (but moreover it is the possibility
of impossibility – of discontinued existence) it seems that to be without that
possibility is to cease to be. It is important that death is not conceived as an event that
happens to me - it is a possibility that I have, indeed it is my ‘ownmost’ possibility. My
death is ineliminably mine - no-one can die for me. Note that we have moved away
from talking about ‘death in general’, as such generality can lead us away from the
authenticity that we are pursuing.
Heidegger is explicit that it is possible to die without doing so authentically - a state
that he calls ‘demise’ - and even this sort of death is still different to the sort of death
that belongs to an animal. As Mulhall states, ‘An animal’s relation to death is as
different from Dasein’s relation to death as animal existence is different from human
existence.’ (Mulhall 2008b:116) Following the distinction between animals and
Dasein that I pursued in the preceding sections, the referential totality is not disclosed
to animals in the same way, they do not undertake the same sorts of projects we do
and they do not understand themselves in terms of their existential possibilities. As
such, death is not the ‘possibility of impossibility’ for them that it is for Dasein. Here
we have a third criterion - existential understanding of death - to stand alongside
handiness and language as a marker of anthropicism.24
So what precisely is the character of inauthentic demise? Heidegger claims that
everyday Dasein exists in the ‘they’ – the total society and/or culture in which Dasein
lives, it is everyone and yet nobody specific. It is manifest in the way that we are
influenced by popular perceptions – what literature we read, art we appreciate and so
on. This is, Heidegger claims, where we for the most part get our understanding of
certain things including our understanding of death. There are three key ways in
which ‘They’ idly discuss death. First, as a mishap - the sort of discussion which
The Onion have a brilliant short ‘news’ video where they show a gorilla who has been taught by scientists about
its mortality, which I would very strongly recommend.
24
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allows one to conclude ‘but it won’t happen to me’. Second, in a fugitive manner, so
that death will happen eventually, but we shouldn’t worry about it. Third, in very
general terms - ‘one dies’ - once again, in a way which can allow me to avoid the
specificity of my death. (Heidegger 1996:297)
The crux for Heidegger is that the everyday way in which we talk about death allows
us to hide the fact of death as my own-most possibility of being. Within the generality
of the They, I do not have to face up to death as my ownmost possibility. An authentic
attitude towards my death means facing up to my own finitude - realising my
limitedness, and in the face of that taking hold of my own existence and pursuing that
which really matters for me. For me, this becomes clear when one contrasts what it
would be like for me to die with my experience with the death of another. The dead
loved one is like an empty space at the dinner table, a sort of hole in the world which
you have to get used to. My own death, by contrast would be marked by the world
being lost - I no longer have the chance to complete my projects, indeed I am no
longer. In this way, Dasein’s finitude is marked by a withdrawal from the world - the
seat of all possibilities. An authentic attitude towards finitude is to respond to this by
deciding what really matters and pursuing that, by not living in the They, and by
taking hold of one’s own Being25. Whether this authenticity is compatible with
laughter is a question that I hope to have answered by the end of this thesis, but for
the moment let’s just say that I do not see any a priori reason why they should be
incompatible. Importantly, I believe that this question can only be adequately
addressed with sustained phenomenology.
2.7 Comic Embodiment
Now we can turn to comic embodiment, at the heart of which Critchley claims ‘[is] the
fact of having a body. But to find this funny is to adopt a philosophical perspective, it
is to view the world and myself disinterestedly.’ (Critchley 2002:62) So, it is clear that
Critchley pinpoints a specific ingredient of the comic body. Like Obama’s penny, the
deworlded body is strange, and it is this strangeness which we find comical. When
This is, at this stage, a rather crude simplification. A more in depth discussion of Heideggerean authenticity will
be drawn out in the chapters to follow, especially chapters 3, 6 and 7.
25
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Molloy ‘concocts a mathematical analysis of his flatulence’ (Critchley 2002:48), we
can’t help but laugh, but I want to challenge the idea that this is the only time that the
body is comical.
Critchley’s theory of the comic body can be summarised as ‘exploiting the gap
between being a body and having a body.’ (Critchley 2002:43) I want to claim that we
are embodied but we can reify aspects of our embodiment, and moreover, that this
reification is distinct from failed embodiment. To pursue this, I need to draw out my
conception of embodiment.
We need to resist the notion that embodiment is characterised exclusively by matter
which is biological. The organismic boundary which terminates at my epidermis is not
the same thing as the boundary of my embodiment. Embodiment is the dynamic
relation between bio-matter and equipment, the boundaries of which expand and
retract both sides of the organismic one. To give an example, when one reifies and
estranges a part of the body, whether by ‘pure act of will’, with anesthetic, or as a
consequence of a clinical condition, the body part is no longer embodied in the way
that it was before. Furthermore, when I skillfully use a pair of pliers, they are
embodied despite not being ‘an organic part of me’.
Following de Vignemont (2010a, 2010b & 2007), I want to claim that this conception
of embodiment needs to be understood as dissociable from the sense of ownership.
Moreover, this conception of embodiment refers to motor embodiment rather than
perceptual embodiment. The difference is that perceptual embodiment consists in the
object being part of the ‘body image’, whereas motor embodiment consists in the
object being part of the body schema - the ‘sensorimotor representations’ which guide
our movement in the world. So, motor embodiment is characterised by the equipment
and body parts that are motorically ‘available’. Phenomenologically, this availability
takes the form of it ‘getting out of the way’ so that I can go about my business.
Once we have in mind this availability, we can see that often both tool failure and
bodily failure are marked by retractions in the boundary of our embodiment. It is
important to note that not all objects I use in my day-to-day life become ‘embodied’,
so not all failure is marked by this retraction. When a chair fails to accommodate my
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weight, this failure is not a retraction like the failed scissors are, but in scissor failure,
chair failure and leg failure, they are all marked by a sudden ‘becoming salient’. The
important issue is what precisely this saliency discloses. In the case of the failed
scissors and chair, I would argue that they disclose the referential totality. However, I
don’t believe it is the same in the case of my leg failing me.
It is an obvious truism to point out that chronic leg failure can be profoundly
debilitating. There is a certain degree to which this can be compensated by social and
technological adaptations, but ultimately it is hard to deny that it is the case. If I use
the example of cramp in my leg, its sudden salience might distract me from the
lecture I am trying to listen to, but such difficulty pales in comparison to that of
chronic pain sufferers. It seems to me that such difficulty causes direct confrontation
with ones own limitedness. We must remember that Dasein’s relationship towards its
own existence and the world is in terms of its possibilities and just as the failed object
has the potential to thwart Dasein’s project, so does the failed body. However, in the
former, we are made to face the concrete situation in the world, the latter has the
potential to make us face the fact that not everything is possible, that we are
constrained by very concrete limitations. This will be the central question I will
address with sustained phenomenology in the seventh - and final - chapter.
2.8 Conclusion
Let us finish by looking over the central claims that I made in this chapter. I started
by looking at the incongruity theory, which I want to claim is deeply compatible with
the Heideggerean picture I am trying to draw up. If we construe Koestler’s associative
contexts as being the same as Heidegger’s referential contexts, and refrain from trying
to completely formalise them, we have an account which can be used to explain
incongruity. I went on to problematise ‘unconscious rule-following’ and the concept of
mind more generally, which led on to a challenge of Freudian release theory. This first
part was summarised by my stating that I do not think it possible to pinpoint the
necessary and sufficient conditions of humour, and that it was not my intention to do
so. Instead, I claimed, I want to build an account which accommodates the
‘hermeneutic’ condition of humour’s intelligibility - world.
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The second part looked at existing (worlded) phenomenologies of humour, starting
with Critchley’s treatment of morphism. I argued Critchley did not go far enough to
draw out conceptions of either animality, which I want to claim is marked by
worldhood poverty, or objecthood. Carroll’s account was altogether more successful
as a phenomenology of the ready-to-hand object and skillful coping, and he brought
out the issue of how Chaplinesque transgressions and failure disclose the referential
totality. After taking a detour into ‘dark humour’ and concluding that an existential
analytic was preferable to a psychological one, we moved on to the failed body, which
I want to claim discloses one’s own limitedness.
In the next chapter, I will deal with the existing literature in four key areas animality, object morphism (i.e. puppetry and robotics), object theory, and
embodiment - and explore the extent to which my ideas challenge that literature.
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3. Dasein
The previous chapter was a critical engagement with the existing literature on
humour, and it is my hope that through this engagement I was able to draw out the
Heideggerean account of world. A central claim that I want to make throughout this
thesis is that we need to understand the phenomenon of humour in terms of Dasein literally ‘being there’. As the last chapter dealt primarily with the ‘there’, (i.e. the
phenomenon of world), it seems that now is the point at which we are suitably
equipped to address ‘being’, or more precisely what it means for one to ‘be there’. An
account of this will similarly be drawn out in opposition to the literature (specifically
regarding bodies, objects and animals) but before that, I feel it necessary to outline a
couple of ideas that are central to Heidegger’s work. Let us look at what precisely
Heidegger says about Dasein, and its understanding of Being.
Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is
ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue
for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this
implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being - a
relationship which itself is one of Being... Understanding of Being is itself a
definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it
is ontological. (Heidegger 1996:32)
Whilst not an easy passage for one to grasp, Heidegger is making a claim that is
essential to understanding his work. Simply put, that Dasein has an understanding of
Being - it understands a chair as a chair, another Dasein as a Dasein and it has a
relationship to its own being. This is a characteristic which distinguishes Dasein from
the world-poor animal and the worldless stone. Heidegger goes on to clarify that
‘Dasein’s “Being-ontological” is not...tantamount to “developing an ontology”.’
(Heidegger 1996:32) Rather, I would assert that it is only on the basis of our already
having an understanding of Being that we can develop ontologies, such as the ones we
find throughout the philosophical tradition (and the tacitly assumed ontologies found
in the sciences). It is tempting to describe these ontologies as ‘elucidating’ our tacit
understanding of Being, but I suspect that would be misleading as according to
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Heidegger most of the tradition has been gravely mistaken. The passage above also
draws out a crucial distinction between the ontic and ontological. For Heidegger, the
ontological pertains to the Being of a particular being, the ontic pertains specifically to
what a particular being (e.g. Dasein) does or can do. So, we can say that ontically you
are reading this sentence, but this is possible because ontologically you are in a world
with a set of involvements. The structure of this is developed further in the following
quotation.
Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue.
Essentially ahead of itself, it has projected itself upon its potentiality-for-Being
before going on to any mere consideration of itself. In its projection it reveals
itself as something which has been thrown. It has been thrownly abandoned into
the ‘world’, and falls into it concernfully. As care - that is, existing in the unity of
the projection which has been fallingly thrown - this entity has been disclosed as
a “there”. (Heidegger 1996:458)
So, when Heidegger says that Dasein’s Being is itself an issue, that means that
Dasein’s encounter with the world is structured by a relationship of ‘care’ - Dasein
undertakes projects which matters to it. It is thrown into a world teeming with
historical meaning - a shared manifold of interlocking practices, equipments and
skills for using them - which Dasein picks up concernfully.26 The term ‘care’ is utilised
deliberately for the plethora of connotations which go with it - I might care for a child,
ask someone if they would care for some coffee, care about the Iraq war, care about
my stamp collection and I might ‘take care’ of a tricky situation. Hubert Dreyfus once
asked Heidegger if he was bothered by the very specific (ontic) connotations that the
word ‘care’ carries in English, to which Heidegger responded that it was fortunate as
‘he wanted to name the very general fact that...being gets to me.’ (Dreyfus 1997:239)
So, Dasein is a Being for which its Being is an issue, and it is thrown into a world with
pre-existing meanings out of which it cultivates projects which matter to it. To give a
specific example, I happen to have been thrown into a culture with a rich heritage of
theatre, and it is on the basis of that culture that I am able to pursue the projects of a
As we will see later on, Heidegger distinguishes between ‘concern’ and ‘care’. Concern is generally oriented
towards objects and things whereas care is generally oriented towards one’s own being and that of other Dasein.
26
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theatre maker and scholar in a theatre department. In this way, my writing a doctoral
thesis in a theatre department is possible only on the basis of my being thrown into
the world and taking up certain projects concernfully.
Now that we have set out the basic groundwork, let us turn once more to the
literature. The rest of this chapter will be divided into three sections - first, there will
be a section on embodiment; second, a section on objects; and finally, a section on
animality. It is my hope that, by drawing out the aspects in which my views diverge
with the current trends in the literature, the reader will have a good understanding of
where I am situating my inquiry. This chapter will conclude the first part of the thesis
- the ‘theoretical’ component - and in the chapters that follow I will be engaging in
sustained phenomenology. As such, it is my hope that by the end of this chapter the
reader will have been introduced to all the concepts necessary to pursue the task
ahead.
3.1 The Issue of Embodiment
I want to begin by being explicit in a distinction that I am making between the body broadly speaking the lump of matter studied by scientists27 - and ‘embodiment’, itʼs
phenomenological correlate. A key claim that I want to make is that whilst the former
is delimited by the epidermal boundary - that is, the body ends at the surface of my
skin - embodiment has a plasticity 28 which allows its boundary to extend beyond and
retract behind the epidermal one. I will be using literature in cognitive science to
support my claims, before moving on to the phenomena of failure in embodiment,
characterised by a sudden retraction of this boundary.
In their paper, When Pliers Become Fingers in the Monkey Motor System, Umilta et
al (2008) describe an experiment in which they trained monkeys to use a pair of pliers
27 I feel I should add a small caveat regarding how I want to understand the Body. I think we should resist the
notion that the Body is something fundamentally ‘prior to’ our worldly understanding of it. Rather, it is better
understood as a reification of the embodiment which I will outline shortly. As such, the concept of the Body is
inseparable from our socially informed, and (in modernity) scientifically framed understanding of it. In short, it is
a fallacy to equate the Body with a mythical ‘presocial’ lump of flesh.
28 It is not the only distinguishing characteristic between the two and it might not be the defining one, but it is one
which I wish to focus on.
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and then tested neurons in the primary motor cortex during such skillful tool use.
Their finding is perhaps a surprising one, which I feel merits quotation.
In addition to being incorporated into the body schema, the tool, after learning,
is coded into the motor system as if it were an artificial hand able to interact
with the external objects, as the natural hand is able to do. (Umilta 2008:2211)
It is perhaps worth clarifying what precisely the term ʻbody schemaʼ refers to. Broadly
speaking, the body schema is usually construed in contrast to the body image, along a
faultline of an action/perception dichotomy. The body schema pertains to
sensorimotor ‘representations’, the body image to perceptual representations. This is
a simplification, as the two interact to a great extent, but at the moment I don’t feel
we need go into that. One thing that is crucial to note is that it is fundamentally a nonrepresentational state of ‘bodily awareness’. An account of the critical role that the
body schema has in our being-in-the-world is brought out forcefully by Taylor
Carman in the following passage.
The body schema [is not] an image of the body, for images are objects of
awareness, whereas schemata sketch out in advance and hence structure our
awareness of objects. The body schema is not a representation of the body, then,
but our ability to anticipate and (literally) incorporate the world prior to
applying concepts to objects. This ability, which Merleau-Ponty calls “habit”, is
not objective knowledge, nor is it internal to the mind, for “it is the body that
‘understands’ in the acquisition of habit”. (Carman 2008:106)
So, it is hopefully becoming clear that the body schema has a strong relationship to
the know-how that I was discussing in the previous chapter. Moreover, according to
Merleau-Ponty (2009), the body schema is more fundamental than the body image,
and it is only on the basis of our having a body schema that we can have ‘objects of
awareness’ and representational knowledge. However, for my purposes I want to
delve into the issue of ‘incorporation’, and possibility that object can be incorporated
into both the body image and the body schema. Building on the distinction between
the body image and body schema, Frederique de Vignemont claims that there is a
crucial difference between motor-embodiment (relating to the body schema) and
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perceptual-embodiment (relating to the body image), and she argues this by
contrasting tool use with the rubber hand illusion.
In the rubber hand illusion, the experimenter hides the volunteerʼs hand behind a
screen whilst getting them to look at a rubber hand. The experimenter gently brushes
the volunteerʼs hidden hand and the rubber hand synchronously. After about one to
two minutes, the volunteer will report having feeling in the rubber hand. This effect is
a classic case of the body image incorporating an object.
The tool use, by contrast, is related to ‘motor embodiment’, as the phenomenon is not
that you have feeling in the tool, but rather your sensorimotor system expands to
include the equipment. Frederique de Vignemontʼs paper, (2010b) Widening the
Body to Rubber Hands and Tools: What’s The Difference? gives a good overview of
the experimental data, and in it she argues that the tool is ‘motorically’ embodied (i.e.
part of the body schema) and the rubber hand is perceptually embodied by way of an
example. When we want to stir a pot of boiling soup, we are more likely to use a spoon
than our hand, and some people argue that this is indicative of the fact that I donʼt
think of the spoon as ‘part of me’. In response to this, de Vignemont claims that we
need to understand the body image as encompassing body affect as well as percept. A
number of rubber hand illusion studies have shown that if you threaten the rubber
hand with a hammer then the subject responds just as you would expect them to if
their biological hand was threatened. However, despite tools being motorically
embodied, the subjects do not react affectively to their tool being threatened in the
same way, suggesting that ‘motor embodiment’ is dissociable from the feeling that an
embodied object is ‘part of me’. My suggestion, and the point at which I suspect I
diverge from de Vignemont, is that when the object is both motorically and
perceptually embodied we get the same sense of ownership that we are accustomed to
having with our biological limbs. A paradigmatic case of this is prosthesis - I would
suggest that the prosthetic limb eventually becomes perceptually and motorically
embodied and from this arises the sense of ownership that is often reported.29
29 There is, of course, a very important question of ‘priority’. That is the question of which comes first, perceptual
or motor embodiment. My personal position is that, both ontologically and developmentally, the body schema is
more fundamental than the body image. The implication of this is that the ‘motor embodiment’ is similarly more
fundamental. However, as there is a great level of interaction between the two, and as distortions of the body
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So, we are able to integrate equipment into our body schema in accordance with the
requirements of the concrete task at hand, and we are also able to integrate objects
into the body image so that they are perceptually embodied. My suggestion is that a
sense of ownership emerges out of these two forms of embodiment. This is a complex
picture which is not simplified by the clinical literature on body disownership. ʻAlien
handʼ syndrome is a denial of ownership towards a part of the body which is entirely
dissociable from cases of the patient motorically neglecting it. By this I mean the
patient may well still use the limb, yet deny that it belongs to him. The opposite view
would be the patient without use of a limb who nevertheless maintains a sense of it
being part of him, a view which is prevalent in the literature.30
In short, that a limb is part of the body necessitates neither that it is embodied
(motorically or perceptually) nor that it is experienced as owned. Similarly, the
objectʼs ʻartificialityʼ precludes neither ownership nor embodiment. What is needed
now is a phenomenology to frame these claims in order to understand what the
consequences of this is in terms of my inquiry.
Let us recall the introduction, in which I described Heidegger’s claim about the readyto-hand object. Insofar as it is fulfilling its function optimally, it is ‘transparent’ - we
don’t really ‘register’ it on a conscious level, and my attention is focussed on the
activity with which I am immersed31. When I use a pair of scissors to cut a piece of
paper, the phenomena is not that I hold a ‘thing’ which cuts the paper but simply I cut
the paper. My claim is that this transparency is crucial characteristic of the embodied
object, a claim that is supported by Sobchack’s description of her experience as a
prosthesis user.
Those who successfully incorporate and subjectively live the prosthetic ...sense
themselves neither as lacking something nor as walking around with some
“thing” attached on to their bodies. Rather, in most situations, the prosthetic as
image leads to serious pathological conditions, I don’t think that this priority necessitates that either are ‘more
necessary’ for the sort of being-in-the-world that I am interested in.
30 It might even be the usual response to losing use of a limb, if indeed there is such a thing as a ‘usual response’ to
that happening.
31 Indeed, I don’t even need to bring conceptual representations into it and I just relate to the world in a
precognitive manner.
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lived in use is transparent; that is, it is as “absent”… as is the rest of our body
when we’re focused outward to the world and successfully engaged in the
various projects of our daily life… The prosthetic becomes an object only when
there is a mechanical or social problem that pushes it obtrusively into the
foreground of one’s consciousness (Sobchack 2009:283)
So, according to Sobchack, the prosthetic and the ‘biolimb’ are experienced as ‘absent’
- insofar as our focus is on the activities with which we are immersed, the limbs are
not really present as part of our phenomenological field. That such transparency is
necessary for immersion to take place is highlighted in their failure - the failed
prosthetic or biolimb suddenly becomes a ‘thing’ which gets in the way as it is ‘pushed
obstrusively into the foreground of one’s consciousness’. This failure is a transition
from ‘transparent’ to ‘salient’, and in the case of the object which is embodied (e.g.
pliers, prosthetic or rubber hand), this sudden transition results in a sudden shift in
our embodiment. When the embodied object or limb fails it suddenly ceases being
embodied and the ‘boundary of embodiment’ shrinks.
Now, as a caveat, I feel I should be explicit that I am not claiming that all objects that
we use become embodied - many objects, such as the clock on my bedroom wall, are
not embodied because they do not need to be. My claim is that our experience of the
embodied object’s failure is phenomenologically distinct to the failure of the clock or
other non-embodied objects. When the pliers or prosthetic limbs fail, this failure
entails a sudden retraction of the ‘boundary of embodiment’. In this way, there is a
commonality between those objects and the failed ‘bio-limb’ - both cases are
characterised by this sudden retraction. In order to elucidate this commonality, and
the aspects in which the failure of bio-limb and embodied object differ, we need to
look back at what Heidegger claims about the failed object.
The ready-to-hand scalpel, for example, is part of a ‘referential totality’ in which the
scalpel, the operating table and the heart monitor all relate to one another. So when it
fails, its failure discloses this referential context - we are suddenly made to stand back
from the activity in which we were previously immersed and pay heed to this context.
If the scalpel breaks, the surgeon can try to repair it, search for a replacement or
resign herself to the fact that Mr. Patterson is not getting his new kidney. What she
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can’t do is continue the same relationship to the equipment, at least not until the
problem is resolved. What, by contrast, would it be like if her arm failed? If we
imagine a situation in which the surgeon’s arm ‘goes dead’, it is not clear to me that it
discloses the referential context in the same way as the failed scalpel does. If we
assume that she is not ambidextrous, she can’t just ‘replace’ it (in the sense that she
can’t use another limb), and despite being a physician it is unlikely that she would be
in a position to repair her arm (not least because it is the main limb she uses in acts of
repairing). It seems that resignation is the only option - if nobody else can perform
the operation, Mr. Patterson has to return to the ward without his new kidney.
However, let’s focus on the precise status on the arm. There are probably countless
operations in which the surgeon’s limb was unproblematic - it was fully embodied,
both motorically and perceptually. As such, when she was ‘in flow’, she didn’t really
notice it. The focus of her attention was the operation underway. It is a necessary
feature of the embodied limb (and all embodied items, including prostheses) that we
can ‘see through’ it - we can just get on with the task without needing to attend to the
limb at all.
Although I can perceive my body in the same way that I perceive other things - I
can see it, touch it, taste it, etc. and, in these cases, it is the object at which some
state of awareness is directed - there is another form of bodily awareness. It is
what can be called an ‘adverbial’ form of awareness. Rather than being aware of
my body, I am simply aware in my body. (Romdenh-Romluc 2011:105)
Simon Critchley (2002) claims that humour of the body exploits the gap between
being a body and having a body. In my view, the latter case - having a body - occurs
when embodiment retracts behind the epidermal boundary so that the body part
becomes reified as a ‘thing’ outside of myself. That is, the limb loses its transparency
and becomes a problematic ‘thing’ which stands in opposition to our intentions.
However, I would go further and claim that whilst the object failing discloses the
contexture of equipment and concrete activity surrounding what we were trying to do,
the failed body discloses our limitedness. When one slips up on the way to collect an
award, it serves as a reminder that both the nobel laureate and the local postman are
subject to the same limits - gravity always wins. Classicists might be reminded of
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Socrates’ talking of Thales, a man who falls into a ditch because he is busy looking at
the sky, with the local bystanders having a laugh at his expense.
3.1.1 Embodiment and Normativity
At this point, it might be wise to address the fact that this conception of embodiment
runs counter to the ‘common sense’ view of the body, which was expressed brilliantly
by one of my students. Upon my asking ‘what do you mean by ‘body’?’, she responded
by slapping her leg and saying ‘this’. I believe that this view is tacitly upheld by most
people but very seldom articulated - at least linguistically. The articulation of this view
can instead be found in our architecture and city planning, even in the tools which
have ‘evolved’ alongside our social structures. Of course, I am referring to the very
structures analysed within disabilities studies.
In designing a building with stairs but no ramp, or very narrow corridors, the
designer assumes a notion of the ‘normal body’ - a template of which can be found on
the door of most public lavatories. Until recently, it was assumed that anyone who
didn’t conform to this template was an ‘invalid’ (a horrid term when one thinks about
it), and was prevented from accessing certain social institutions because of this.
However, the ‘social model of disability’ tried to challenge this assumption, and
claimed that ‘that people with accredited or perceived impairments, regardless of
cause, are disabled by society’s failure to accommodate their needs’. (Barnes 2002:5)
This was a revolutionary idea which highlighted the normativity surrounding
embodiment.
However, as Hughes (2002) argues, this idea was also problematic. For the social
model, like the ‘medical model’ that preceded it, the claims were steeped in a
nature/culture dichotomy which, in my view, does not hold much water. The notion
that ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ can be neatly defined in terms of the former being
‘physical’ and the latter being ‘social’ is, I would claim, deeply misleading. We need to
resist the idea that ‘the body’ is presocial and fundamental, and realise that our
understanding of it is inseparable from the social and medical institutions which
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shape the way we relate to it. This is not to deny the fact of our corporeality, but
rather to argue that we understand it through our social structures of knowledge.
The greatest figure in modern architecture, Le Corbusier, argued ‘that all men
have the same organism and same functions...the same needs.’ Such a universal
claim - typical of liberal modernity - cuts across bodily difference and suggests a
homogenous aesthetic of the built environment which will, by definition, exclude
disabled people. (Hughes 2002:72)
What this quotation brings out forcefully is that insofar as one conflates embodiment
with ‘the body’ as represented on the door of the public lavatories, our society will
necessarily have a disabling effect on its citizens. In that regard, I feel my conception
of embodiment is more progressive.32 When we regard embodiment with respect to its
essential ‘plasticity’, that is when we take account of the way in which equipment can
be embodied, we have a better understanding of why it is so incredibly inappropriate
for a police or security officer to remove a man from his wheelchair. Moreover, we are
better positioned to understand what we ought to be doing to make our social
institutions so that we minimise their disabling potential.
3.1.2 Contra Clark
Any readers who are familiar with the work of Andy Clark may have already detected
a marked influence on the arguments presented thus far, and I think I should admit
this influence. However, I want to claim that my position is fundamentally different
from Clark and others working in the field of ‘extended cognition’.
In his book, Supersizing the Mind, Clark (2008) first introduces the concept of the
extended mind through a quotation from the physicist Richard Feynman, who insists
that his papers were not a record of his work but in fact are his work. The idea being
that the pen and paper are, according to Clark, part of the extended cognitive system.
32 Whilst I am aware that this is a small tangent from the main area, I felt it necessary to acknowledge the social
and political implications of the view that I am putting forward. Not least because I think this ‘progressiveness’ is
one of the strengths of this view.
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Maximally opposed to [the ‘brainbound’ notion of cognition] is a view according
to which thinking and cognizing may (at times) depend directly and
noninstrumentally upon the ongoing work of the body and/or the
extraorganismic environment…The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct,
are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into the body and world. (Clark
2008:xxxviii)
Clark goes on to state explicitly that ‘minds and bodies are essentially open to
episodes of deep and transformative restructuring in which the equipment (both
physical and “mental”) can become quite literally incorporated in thinking and acting’
(Clark, 2008:31). In this regard, Clark’s position is not too different from my own, and
I would go so far as to uphold that cognition is indeed extended. If I can only calculate
something with a pen and paper, then it is right to claim my cognition is extended to
incorporate the equipment that I use. However, I think it is dangerous to put so much
emphasis on the process of ‘cognition’, as Heidegger is explicit in stating that such
cognition is derivative. Moreover, I would claim that whilst Clark may well think that
what he is doing is ‘Heideggerean cognitive science’, I think that there are serious
limitations to his scientific-analytic approach. This point is brought out convincingly
in Ratcliffe’s paper, Why There Can Be No Cognitive Science of Dasein.
Heideggerean “smooth coping” is not about environmental off-loading or about
flexible organism-environment couplings...It presupposes a world of
possibilities and needs to be understood against the backdrop of that world.
Hence what we cannot coherently do, if Heidegger is right, is dissociate
readiness-to-hand from the world in which it is intelligible, situate that within a
present-at-hand, scientifically described world instead, re-interpret it in terms of
environmental nudges and call the result ‘Heideggerean’ (Ratcliffe 2012:22)
Ultimately, this is why I think there is a limitation to the scientific approach to the
phenomena of the embodied object. Insofar as it is understood scientifically, the
phenomena of world and the ready-to-hand become construed in such a way that they
are necessarily reified (present-at-hand). It is for that reason that, despite the fact that
I have looked at the cognitive science literature in support of my claims regarding
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embodiment, I feel it is best investigated phenomenologically. For that reason, when I
pick up the topic of embodiment again in chapter 7, I will do so by way of sustained
phenomenology. As such, the next section will move away from the issue of the body
and instead take up that of the object, or more specifically the question, ‘what does it
mean for the object to be humanlike?’.
3.2 The Issue of Objects
3.2.1 The Phenomenon of the Puppet
The literature on puppetry and object theatre seems to have a peculiar tendency
towards taxonomy. Many of the key theorists set out to create exhaustive taxonomies
of puppets, and have fixed notions about what should and should not count as a ‘true
puppet’. This tendency is particularly evident in Eichler’s proclamation that the glove
puppet should not count as a puppet, due to the fact that it is a ‘prolongation’ of the
actor. (Jurkowski 1988:22) In contrast to Eichler, I want to claim that such
‘prolongation’ is actually a necessary characteristic of puppetry. As a puppeteer, when
I skillfully manipulate a puppet, it becomes embodied in much the same way as the
pliers do. However, this characteristic does not distinguish the ‘animated’ object from
any other embodied object. An idea that is often used to distinguish the ‘animated’
object from the inanimate one is ‘the illusion of life’, and I believe that untangling
precisely what this means requires a phenomenological approach. In my view, there is
a crucial distinction between looking humanlike and being humanlike, and the latter
case is characterised by being-in-the-world.
Terminologically, I will use ‘anthropomorphic’ in reference to the object looking
humanlike and ‘anthropic’ to the object being humanlike. In the case of the former,
the object looking humanlike, examples include the clothes store mannequin,
Michelangelo's David and a Barbie doll. Now, I don't want to claim that photographlike realism is characteristic of all anthropomorphism. In fact, there is demonstrably a
tendency in animation and puppetry towards neoteny - that is, exaggerating the size
of the head and eyes towards a scale similar to that found in a newborn child (e.g.
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Manga animation and Bratz dolls). Many anthropologists, such as Terrence Deacon33,
believe that there is an evolutionary basis to our fondness for such exaggeration (i.e.
they remind us of children, which we are ‘hardwired’ to care about) but that is rather
tangential to my inquiry. The main criteria for an object looking humanlike seems to
be an arrangement of eyes, mouth, limbs etc. in a broadly similar configuration to the
people one encounters every day.
By contrast, I want to claim the anthropic object is a being-in-the-world. Now, I feel I
should state that the term ‘anthropic’, and indeed, the term ‘humanlike’, is a
misnomer. Although Dasein does refer to human beings, it could in principle refer to
other beings that have an understanding of being - most aliens from science fiction
would fulfill the criteria, as would the apes from Planet of the Apes and many robotic
companions from science fiction such as Marvin the Paranoid Android and HAL.34 In
all these cases, their being is fundamentally being-in-the-world, characterised by
ongoing practical activities which matter to it. In my particular (ontic) case, I am
currently trying to present my ideas in the form of a doctoral thesis and my doing so
entails a whole contexture of activities, equipment and skills for using them - in
principle there is nothing to prevent Marvin the Paranoid Android from doing the
same, despite the fact that he is not a member of the species Homo Sapiens. So, the
anthropic object is one which, rather than being piece of equipment which we utilise
in our practical activity, engages in projects with us.
Whilst the worlds of science fiction are filled with objects that move from being tools
which humans utilise in their projects to Dasein which engage in projects with them,
there has been very little effort within the theatre/film literature to analyse this
phenomena.35 By contrast, the fields of computer science and robotics are teeming
with research programmes looking at this transition. Due to the fact that ‘sociability’
is one of the most commercially successful traits a computer system can have, there is
substantial empirical literature on this topic that I feel is worth looking at in a little
Terrence Deacon (2009) touches on this a little bit in his undergraduate anthropology course.
I am specifically referring to the original Charlton Heston film (Schaffner 1968), the Douglas Adams novel
(Adams 1979) and the Stanley Kubrick classic (Kubrick 1968). Although all three have appeared in other media,
these are either the versions with which I am most familiar. (Or the ones I prefer).
35 As noted by Hannah Ballou, one of my colleagues on the Ph.D programme, this is probably because theatre and
film makers don’t need to worry about what makes this achieveable. They just take it for granted in using
techniques that they know to work.
33
34
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detail. Whilst the caveats I put forward regarding the ‘scientific’ approach remain in
place, I feel it is instructive to look at the work in these fields before moving onto
sustained phenomenology in the later chapters.
As mentioned previously, Clifford Nass (2004) discovered that computer programmes
that synthesise speech invoke a social response, and this response is not found in
cases where information is conveyed solely by text on a screen. Now, obviously they
realise that the computer doesn't have feelings, so there is not rationality behind their
doing so, but nevertheless politeness is our usual response to synthetic speech. This is
something we are naturally inclined to do, and I think there is an obvious
phenomenological reason for this. Speech is a shared cultural practice that we all
engage in - we speak as we do because of the world that we share, and so it is quite
natural that this practice is subject to certain normative criteria. We pick this up
alongside our other worldly activities - one says 'bless you' when someone sneezes,
thanks someone for opening the door, and so on - and this politeness develops to a
level such that it is automatic in socially proficient adults.
Written language, such as those on the screen, is usually a sort of vicarious sociality.36
If I were to I see a post it-note on the fridge saying, ‘Shaun, I think it's your turn to
buy the milk’, I would probably infer that it is expressing the wishes of my flatmate
rather than of the fridge. This is because I am familiar with a shared cultural practice
in which people who live with each other sometimes stick up passive-aggressive notes
instead of discussing things in person. Part of the reason many people find
ventriloquism unsettling is that we are not used to such vicariousness in vocal
discourse.37 What this means is that the robot that chats to me, or indeed, leaves
passive-aggressive notes on appliances, can be said to seem anthropic in a way in
which the shop mannequin cannot.
36 I am aware that the same could be said of the invention of the answerphone. However, it is worth noting that the
recording of voice, in comparison to the invention of writing, is a remarkably modern phenomenon. Now that it is
a fairly prevalent technology, there might be a change in our attitudes towards the voice.
37 Interestingly, within cognitive science there is an effect known as the ‘ventriloquist illusion’ in which the listener
hears the voice coming from the most visually likely source (i.e. a moving mouth) even if the sound is actually
traveling from a different place. Hence why in the cinema the sound coming from behind you still seems to come
from the actors on screen. This, alongside the rubber hand illusion, demonstrates how all our perception is
constitutively multimodal.
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The creation of anthropic objects is a project undertaken by Cynthia Breazeal (2002)
and her colleagues at MIT, who create ‘sociable’ robots - most notably one called
Kismet. Kismet was created not as a tool which one uses to achieve a certain task but
as a social robot with which one interacts. Breazeal’s work on Kismet drew on
literature in child psychology and was principally interested in creating a robot that
has a similar relationship with humans as a young infant does to his or her caregiver,
and as such is prelinguistic - using only a sort of protospeech babbling. Because of
this, her work is a good exploration of the nonlinguistic aspects of this area.
Now, it must be noted that there is more to language than semantic content. The
newborn baby has been found to react preferentially towards the prosody of the
mother’s native language than to those of other languages (prosody being the
rhythmic or musical aspects of language). This is because the developing foetus can
hear the mother speak in utero, and as such develops a sort of ‘prosodic palate’ by the
time it is born (Vihman 2002). Similarly, Kismet is sensitive to the meaning of the
prosody of the language used by the caregiver and whilst the robot can’t understand
precisely what the words mean, it can tell the difference between praise and
prohibition. Furthermore, in taking turns to talk, the caregiver gets a sense from
Kismet that they are conversing with each other. The babbling seems to carry
intentional content by virtue of its role in this shared cultural practice and the
similarity in prosody between the two speakers.
Moreover, a crucial aspect of Kismet’s design is indicative, namely that of saliency. To
typically developed newborns, faces are one of the most salient aspects of the
environment. Obviously this eventually facilitates the ‘reading’ of emotions on the
face of others, but moreover allows for a second integral aspect of saliency - the
shared saliency of things in the world. If I were giving a lecture and then I suddenly
looked out of the window and made a noise of excitement, the chances are high that
many people would turn to see what distracted me. I might have to add specificity
with a point, but generally we are sufficiently familiar with what is normally found in
North London to have a shared sense of what is salient. This sort of ability is shared
by Kismet and the developing infant, such that when the caregiver finds something
salient in the environment, that sense of saliency becomes shared between the
everyone in that situation. By virtue of Kismet being an embodied system, it is able to
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share saliency with its caregiver (with gaze and protospeech), and respond to the
speech and movement of humans. Furthermore, it has a sense of personal space and
responds affectively if this is violated. All this adds up to a system which seems to be
‘in-the-world’ with us and this is the essence of the anthropic object.
As quite a bit of material has been covered in a short passage, it might be worth
summarising the key claims thus far. An object being able to speak to us (broadly
construed to include ‘babbling’ in prosody similar to ours), being able to share a sense
of saliency, and responding affectively to sharing a space, are all traits indicative of
the object being-in-the-world with us. However, I would not go as far as to claim that
they are necessary or sufficient. Moreover, these are all ontic, and undue focus on
these traits might lead us to lose sight of the fact that we are interested in the
ontological status. To recall Heidegger, Dasein ‘has been thrownly abandoned into the
‘world’, and falls into it concernfully’ (Heidegger 1996:458) So ultimately, whilst we
can claim that these ontic characteristics are indicative - that is, it is only on the basis
of our being-in-the-world that we can speak or share a sense of saliency - we cannot
end our inquiry there. We need to account for the anthropic object in terms of the
care structure38 - HAL has projects of his own which eventually clashes with those of
his crew, and those projects matter to him. Even Marvin the Paranoid Android, who
ostensibly has nothing ‘to live for’, still has an understanding of Being and projects,
even if those are undertaken in a misanthropic39 manner.
So, this is my broad claim about the anthropic object - that our understanding of it is,
much like our understanding of other Dasein, in terms of our shared being-in-theworld. Moreover I would claim that this is more fundamental than any intellectualist
‘theory-of-mind’. As such, my view stands in opposition to some accounts which posit
that we understand the other in terms of ‘mind-reading’, and by extension that when
we look at the puppet or robot we imagine an ‘inner life’. In fact, it has been suggested
by some that the main deficit in autism is an inability to do precisely that. Several
studies have shown that autistic children, when viewing a puppet show, are unable to
‘mindread’ the puppet. However, I want to claim that this deficit is not the
38 As we will see later on, this structure is constitutively temporal and as such temporality will be an important part
of the portrait of Dasein pursued in this thesis.
39 Here expanded to beyond a dislike of specifically humankind and human society to encompass Dasein more
generally.
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fundamental problem in autism, and that it is only on the basis of our being-in-theworld that we are able to construct ‘theories of mind’. Moreover, for the most part that
is not what I am doing when I am moved by a brilliant piece of puppetry. In order to
challenge this dominant view, I want to spend the next section attacking who I believe
is its strongest proponent, Simon Baron-Cohen (1996).
3.2.2 Baron-Cohen and ‘Mind-blindness’
In his book, Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen looks at the clinical disorder of
autism and identifies what he believes is the primary deficit in that condition,
‘mindblindness’. In my view, Baron-Cohen makes several flawed assumptions about
how human beings understand other people, and as such I feel that this has had an
impact on how we understand both the condition of autism and (more relevant to the
current chapter) the anthropic phenomena outlined in the previous section. In order
to explain where I think Baron-Cohen goes wrong regarding ‘mindreading’, I need to
first address his foundations.
When we hear someone say something (or when we read a sentence in a novel),
aside from decoding the referent of each word (computing its semantics and
syntax), the key thing we do as we search for the meaning of the words is
imagine what the speaker’s communicative intention might be. That is, we ask
ourselves. “What does he mean?” Here, the word “mean” essentially means
“intends me to understand”… In decoding figurative speech (such as irony,
sarcasm, metaphor or humor) mind-reading is even more essential. (BaronCohen 1996:27)
In this passage, I believe Baron-Cohen is assuming the very model that Wittgenstein
(2001) criticises in the Philosophical Investigations.40 Simply put, it is erroneous to
think that the meaning of the word exists ‘in there’ in the speaker’s mind, and that we
need to find it out by some sort of occult method of ‘mindreading’. The meaning of the
word is determined by the context, so - to use an example that Baron-Cohen utilises
40
See §2.1.3, ‘Remarks on Privacy’, in this thesis or Wittgenstein (2001:85)
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later on - when the cop shouts “drop it!” to the robber, the robber doesn’t find out
what ‘it’ refers to by peering ‘in there’ in the mind of the cop. The meaning is clear to
us all and it is out here in the world. If one thinks that Wittgenstein’s criticism is
justified, as I do, then it should be clear that Baron-Cohen’s theory is built on shaky
foundations. He argues that autism is characterised by a deficit in ‘mindreading’, with
the implication being that all non-autistic individuals have (possibly innately) this
‘mindreading faculty’. However, I want to argue that for the most part we have no
need of such a faculty, and although it seems to be the case that people with autism
struggle to create an intellectualist ‘theory of mind’, there is no reason to think that
this is the fundamental deficit behind the disorder. Baron-Cohen builds his theory of
mindreading on the foundations of three necessary cognitive faculties - ‘Intentionality
Detector’ (ID), ‘Eye Direction Detectors’(EDD) and ‘Shared Attention Mechanism’
(SAM). Let us look at them in turn to see to what evidence there is for each.
First, the faculty Baron-Cohen calls the ‘Intentionality Detector’, which I feel is a little
terminologically misleading. There is empirical evidence that very young children are
capable of distinguishing self-propelled objects from objects that require outside
sources of movement. However, as this system does not discriminate between
automobiles and organisms, I don’t think we would be justified for linking it with the
mentalistic terminology of intentionality. It is enough to say simply that children of a
very young age have different expectations of objects that move themselves than
objects that do not. Baillargeon et al. (2009) provide an overview of the experimental
evidence which supports the notion that babies are born with a framework for
understanding this difference - self-propelled objects are expected to be able to alter
their own motion and influence the motion of other objects, whereas non-selfpropelled ones are expected to be inert unless acted upon. At around 14 months of
age, there is evidence that infants react preferentially towards inert objects that
‘converse’ with a series of beeps, but again I would be reluctant to describe such a
preference as ‘detecting intentionality’. It is less presumptuous to simply describe it as
an attentional preference.
The ‘Eye Direction Detector’, Baron-Cohen suggests, has three functions: ‘it detects
the presence of eyes or eye-like stimuli, it computes whether eyes are directed toward
it or towards something else, and it infers... that if another organism’s eyes are
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directed at something then that organism sees that thing.’ (Baron-Cohen 1996:38-9)
The strange thing about Baron-Cohen’s formulation is that it takes a rather reified
form - it sounds like the EDD is a thing whose job is to ‘detect the presence of eyes’
and so on. This is a little misleading, as it simply is not the case that you could open
up the head and locate the EDD. I feel it would be better described along the vein of
‘young children respond preferentially to eyes, enabling them to notice what they are
looking at…’ and so on. By orienting into that kind of description, we can get a better
handle of what is at stake - autistic people struggle to understand ‘gaze-information’.
The question from there is precisely why.
Boraston and Blakemore (2007) use the technology of eye-tracking in order to find
out what differences there are between autistic and non-autistic responses to faces.
They claim that whereas non-autistic people tend to fixate predominantly on the eyes
(but also focus on the nose and mouth) the autistic group displayed a tendency to look
less at the eyes and more at the mouth and other objects in the scene. So, it would
seem that ‘neurotypical’ individuals have an attentional preference for eyes. It is still a
matter of dispute whether or not autistic people have trouble ‘reading’ the eyes of
people once they focus on them (especially under explicit direction of the
experimenter), with some researchers suggesting that they can ‘read eyes’ if they do
look there. However, it is demonstrably the case that there is an attentional
preference towards eyes in non-autistic groups, and autism is a disorder characterised
(at least in part) by a deficit in this attentional preference. Indeed, there are currently
research groups looking eye-tracking’s efficacy in early diagnosis of autism.
The Shared-Attention-Mechanism (SAM) is the faculty which builds on the gazedetection, and allows the development of ‘triadic relations’, e.g. ‘Mummy sees that I
see that car’. Now, obviously if there were to be such a mechanism then it would be
impaired by the deficit in gaze-attention found in autism, and it seems that this is the
case. However, the point at which I start to take issue with Baron-Cohen’s model is his
suggestion that the next stage up is a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM).
A central claim of his essay is that ‘theory of mind’ is necessarily out of reach for
autistic patients. However, several studies have found that people with ‘highfunctioning autism’ are able to construct intellectualist theories about the mental
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states of others, yet demonstrate social deficits (the real world is much more nuanced
than the ToM tests). Regardless, this is an empirical challenge and I consider it more
pertinent to the task at hand to address his fundamental assumptions. I would
probably agree that the infant’s attentional preference towards eyes and self-propelled
objects is a developmental prerequisite of typical development (perhaps even
necessary for becoming a Dasein),41 but I think it is a huge jump from there to any
‘theory of mind’. Moreover, in positing the necessity of ‘mindreading’ for
understanding others, and ‘theory of mind’ as fundamental to our relation with other
humans, he risks distorting our understanding of our being with others.
There is never a gulf between myself and ‘the other’ which I have to bridge. In utero,
the foetus develops affectively ‘in synch’ with the mother, and develops an attentional
preference to the prosody of its mother’s language - a preference which effects the
babbling it eventually makes. Once born, it prefers looking at self-propelled speakers
to inert and silent objects, and of those ‘self-propelled speakers’, it is particularly fond
of the eyes. In almost all cases, that means that the infant will spend most of its time
looking at its mother, eventually noticing at what she tends to look at and imitating
her ‘babbling’ (or speech, to you and me).42. To get this point across, Breazeal quotes
Newson: ‘Human babies become human beings because they are treated like they are
already human beings’. (Breazeal 2002:27) The infant is immersed in the world with a
primary caregiver (usually mother) who always already has an understanding of that
world. To begin with he uses a few ‘proto-social cues’ - looking at mother’s face and
babbling in response to her words and actions - which compels the mother to act as if
he is ‘in-the-world’ as well. Eventually, and I have no idea at what point this happens,
he is.
To summarise, I want to claim that it is in terms of our being-in-the-world that we
understand the actions of other people and other anthropic characters. This is not
reducible to an occult act of ‘mindreading’, and any mindreading that we do engage
with is possible only on the basis of the more fundamental being-in-the-world.43 As
41 However, I suspect that these attentional preferences are by no means unique to Homo Sapiens, so don’t even
skim the surface of the question - ‘how does a baby human become an adult Dasein?’.
42 Vihman (2002) suggests that the mirror neuron system has an integral role to play in this.
43 As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it, we ‘let the world do the work’ – the assumption that they will conform to the norms
of the world make other Dasein, at least for the most part, readable.
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such, there is no gulf that needs to be bridged between my mind and that of the other,
and no act of imagination needed to believe in the ‘inner life’ of the puppet. In my
view, such a position leads to irresolvable pseudo-problems, such as the ‘problem of
other minds’ that has riddled the philosophical tradition for centuries.44
3.2.3 Robots Reloaded
Let us now return to the issue of the anthropic object. There has until recently been an
assumption in robotics that we are more likely to react socially to a system that is both
anthropic and anthropomorphic than a merely anthropic one,45 but a recent study by
Hinds et al. (2004) suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, we seem
rather agnostic when it comes to such a convergence - if the robot looks humanlike
then that's nice, but it's doing so is not necessary for invoking a social response. This
finding is more surprising to roboticists, who have invested millions of dollars trying
to emulate the human form, than it would perhaps be to people interested in object
theatre
Let’s consider again the example I gave of HAL from 2001, A Space Odyssey. HAL
cannot be said to be anthropomorphic - he does not look like a human. Yet, we still
believe in him as a character - indeed, he is probably the most memorable character of
the film. I would claim that this was achieved by Kubrick showing 'him' engaging in
shared practices with the rest of the crew, including vocal communication, opening
doors for Dave and, of course, homicide. These activities, and his existence, mattered
to him and were performed on the basis of them sharing a world together. HAL’s
communicating with them, for example, is possible only on the basis of this shared
manifold of intelligibility - things being salient to everyone, so we all know what one is
talking about when asking HAL to open the doors. In this way, language - although
not a necessary ingredient of an object being anthropic, is at the very least indicative
of the fact that it is. In this case, I would have no qualms in saying that HAL is an
example of Dasein if he were to exist in the real world. In contrast to Brezeal’s robot
This account will be deepened further in §6.3.2, once a detailed portrait of Dasein and world is established.
At this point it might be worth clarifying the precise status of the anthropic object. If HAL or Marvin existed in
the real world then they would undoubtedly be Dasein. By contrast, Brezeal’s robot and Nass’ computer are only
‘Daseinlike’ - imitating the ontic features of Dasein.
44
45
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and Nass’ computer, HAL does not merely approximate the behaviour of Dasein. HAL
has an understanding of Being, projects which matter to him and an existence which
is an issue for him. In my usage of the term ‘anthropic’, I want to be agnostic with
regard to whether the character exists in the ‘real world’46. In this way, I can make the
claim that anthropic robots, anthropic aliens and anthropic homo sapiens are all
Dasein, even though there is only evidence of the latter existing in real life.
So, I want to claim that there is a crucial distinction between anthropomorphic and
anthropic objects, and whilst they often overlap, the two are wholly dissociable.
Furthermore, I want to claim that the anthropic object is characterised by what
Heidegger calls being-in-the-world, and as such a phenomenological investigation
ought to be fruitful. I am not convinced that there are any necessary and sufficient
conditions of an object seeming anthropic, but speech, homicide and passiveaggressive note making are all examples of practical activities in which we can
potentially engage as beings-in-the-world. Crucially, an object becomes anthropic if it
moves from being a piece of equipment that we use in such activity to engaging it that
activity with us. Indeed, the anthropic object can, like HAL and other robots from
science fiction, decide that we human beings are completely superfluous to the
activities with which we are engaged.
3.2.4 Return to Puppetry
There are three key claims that I am making about puppetry and the animated object
more generally. First, the animated object is humanlike by virtue of its being-in-theworld and this is the broad characteristic that underpins the phenomena found in
several historically disparate disciplines. The animated object of Paul Zaloom’s work,
the puppets of Faulty Optic, the animated objects of Jan Svankmajer’s stop-motion,
HAL from 2001, A Space Odyssey (and any genuinely autonomous robots that might
be created in the future) are all examples of anthropic objects and, therefore, Dasein.
Secondly, this being-in-the-world is more fundamental than ‘mindreading’, as it is
only on the basis of our being in the world that we are able to develop any sort of
46 I know that this phrase is far from unproblematic, but I simply mean that we can leave the auditorium and not
have to worry about character’s impact on the fate of our families. Interestingly, in fiction the arrival of nonhuman Dasein is usually depicted as adversely affecting the fate of humanity.
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‘theory of mind’. Third, whilst the phenomena of the animated object in puppet
theatre is like the robot and the stop-motion animations with respect to being-in-theworld, there is an aspect which is unique to this field. Specifically, the skillfully
manipulated puppet becomes embodied in the same way as the pliers or scalpel. It is
in this way that the physical proximity to the animator means that the phenomena of
the animated puppet is distinct. In the next section, I want to critically examine the
literature on puppetry to defend my view against existing explanatory paradigms.
3.2.5 The Semiotic View of Puppetry
Much of the literature of puppetry falls broadly into the semiotic view - that is,
puppets are understood in terms of ‘sign systems’. It is not my intention in this
section to critically evaluate all of the literature in this area, but rather I intend to
challenge the semiotic approach more broadly and in so doing it is my hope that my
challenge will cover a sizeable chunk of the puppetry literature.
Jurkowski’s The Sign Systems of Puppetry takes a historical approach to this
literature, and outlines a broadly semiotic view. One of the key claims that he makes
is that puppetry is essentially parasitic upon other sign systems and that ‘systems are
constituted by the relations between puppet and puppeteers or actors, thereby
producing different functions of the puppet’.(Jurkowski, 1988:70) His point here is
that when utilised in the live theatre, the puppet is a copy of the actor, in storytelling
it is an illustration, in other times it is a copy of human beings. So, the essence of the
puppet is that it has no essence, or rather it is capable of altering its signification. In
the puppet theatre, the puppet is usually seen qua puppet, which presumably means
that we see it in terms of its essential changeability.
An interesting idea that Jurkowski draws out is that of the ‘opalescence’ of the puppet,
which means that we understand the puppet both as a puppet and as a character. For
example, if a puppet were to get tangled in its own strings and then appeal to us for
help, this plays on its ‘double life’ as puppet and character. He then develops this a
little further with the example of the puppet which - recognising that it is a puppet fights back against its manipulator in order to be free. Jurkowski claims that this
expresses an opposition between two sign-systems and has two functions. Firstly, to
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emphasise the ‘artificiality’ of the puppet theatre. Secondly, as the source of the
powerlessness and control metaphor (as in when we refer to a ‘puppet regime’ in
politics, for example).
In the final part of the essay, Jurkowski cites Bogatyrev’s definition of the puppet
theatre, which I feel merits quotation at length.
The main and basic feature differentiating [puppet theatre] from the live theatre
[is] the fact that the speaking and performing object makes temporal use of the
physical sources of the vocal and motor powers which are present outside the
object. The relations between the object (the puppet) and the power sources
change all the time and their variations are of great semiological and aesthetical
significance. (Jurkowski 1998:79-80)
Whilst I agree with him about the fact that the puppet makes use of vocal and motor
powers outside of it, what I believe is missing from Bogatyrev’s account is precisely
the central claim of the previous section - the anthropic object is a being-in-the-world.
However, we have not yet addressed the main point of this section, specifically the
question of how useful the semiotic view is for explaining the phenomena of the
puppet. I have been careful in how I phrase that question, because I do not want to
assume that everyone who has utilised semiotics are doing anything more than a
making a methodological choice. Aston and Savona (1991), for example, are explicit in
claiming that they ‘view theatre semiotics not as a theoretical position, but as a
methodology: as a way of working, of approaching theatre in order to open up new
practices and possibilities of seeing’ (Aston & Sevona, 1991:1). Fundamentally, I have
no problem with people taking such a ‘methodological stance’ - if they draw some
useful insights from doing so then that is fantastic, and I do feel that Jurkowski gains
some useful insights from his inquiry.
However, I feel it necessary to address the semiotic perspective, and draw out why I
feel it is inadequate for looking at the phenomena that I am interested in. To that end,
let us look at what Heidegger (1992) says about signs in History of the Concept of
Time.
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Signs are encountered environmentally; signs are environmental things. The
latest automobiles have a red rotating arrow. At an intersection, the particular
position of the arrow indicates which direction the car will take…[The arrow is]
encountered as in the character of reference like any environmental thing; it is
present in this specific environmental ‘in order to, in a particular serviceability for indicating. This referential structure ‘for indicating’...this structure of ‘in
order to indicate’ is not the indicating itself. This reference of ‘in order to’ as a
mode of handiness, presence, cannot be identified with the indicating; rather,
this ontic indicating is grounded in the structure of reference. (Heidegger
1992:205)
What I particularly like about this quotation is that he does not allow us to entertain
the idea of ‘signs in general’, but rather insists that signs always belong to a specific
contexture of human activity. In this passage, Heidegger claims that the sign - in this
particular case, the car indicator - is possible only on the basis on the more
fundamental referential totality that I have outlined previously. I would like to claim
that the semiotic view is inadequate for looking at the fundamental phenomena of
being-in-the-world simply because it is only on the basis of our being-in-the-world
that there can be any signs.
This point is similar to the one I made regarding ostensive definition in the previous
chapter - just in the same way that I can only point out and name a butterfly on the
basis of already being in a context, semiology similarly presupposes that we already
share a world. Whilst this does not preclude semiotics from being a productive
methodological paradigm for looking at certain phenomena, it does necessarily make
it inadequate for understanding its own hermeneutic conditions (i.e the phenomenon
of world).
3.2.6 A Remark on Death and ‘Thingdom’
As I am trying to claim that the anthropic object is characterised by being-in-theworld, does that mean that its ‘death’ could be parallel to that of the human being? I
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want to claim that the answer is yes, and there are demonstrably cases of this in
fiction. One of my favourite films when I was a child was Short Circuit, in which a
military robot comes to life (or rather, becomes anthropic), with the main tension
arising from him not wanting to be ‘killed’ by the military which created him. Towards
the end of that film, it seems like the military have managed to kill our protagonist
and when I watched this as a child I must confess that I was moved. Whilst in
hindsight I have to admit that it is not the filmic masterpiece that I believed it to be
when I was 8 years old, the point remains that I was moved by the death of an
anthropic object in much the same way as I would be for a human protagonist. I
suspect that even if the object simply returns to equipmentality (after, say, a scene of
mystical enchantment), our relationship to it will still be altered. This asymmetry
echoes one which exists with regard to human death - it is the case that there was a
time before now in which we did not exist, and there will be time in which we exist no
longer but, if you are like me, you will be more concerned about the latter than the
former. Similarly, there was probably a time before a certain loved one was in your
life, and there might be a time when they are no longer part of your life, but only the
latter case is experienced as a lack. This claim about the anthropic object obviously
requires phenomenological investigation, but I think it was necessary to make it in
order to resist the idea that death is characterised by a transition to thingdom. The
corpse is never a thing and it is never dissociable from the Dasein it once was, and our
experience of it is rather uncanny - neither wholly the ‘person who was’, nor ‘not the
person any more’.
3.2.7 Conclusion
In conclusion, I want to claim that we need to understand the object being humanlike
in terms of being-in-the-world. Furthermore, I would claim that the anthropic object,
like the anthropic homo sapiens, is an example of Dasein. Although we have dealt
quite a bit with the ontic level, we must not lose sight of the fact that I am trying to
define my position ontologically. The anthropic object is the object which ‘exists as an
entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue.’ (Heidegger 1996:458) This
position ought to be understood neither in terms of ‘mind reading’ nor semiotics, but
phenomenologically. As such, that is the task I will attempt to undertake in the
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chapters to follow. Before that, let us return to the ‘anthropic animal’ which, like the
anthropic object and anthropic Homo Sapiens, is an example of Dasein, and as such
ought to be understood in terms of being-in-the-world.
3.3 Animals and Worldhood Poverty
To begin, I feel it needs to be made explicit that I am not - and I don’t believe
Heidegger is - making any claims about the ‘inner life’ of the animal. We approach the
issue of animal life rather wrongheadedly if we do so with the question, ‘does the
animal have a mind?’. As I made clear previously, I think it is difficult to even
untangle what ‘having a mind’ means - if you are asking if the animal has an ‘internal
monologue’, then I think the answer is no. All human beings have to have an external
monologue before they can internalise it, and there is no reason to think that the case
of animals would be any different. If you mean to ask, ‘are we correct in utilising
mental predicates in order to describe animal behaviour?’, then the answer lies out
here in the world - just like Wittgenstein’s beetle in a box, if the contents of ‘the mind’
are out of necessity impossible to peer into, then it does not really play a part in our
language game. It seems to me that there probably are cases in which we are right to
describe an animal as clever or cunning. Of course that does not preclude the ‘fallacy
of anthropomorphism’ - that is, describing the animal in terms of mental predicates
which aren’t necessarily warranted. Moreover, I suspect that there are some mental
predicates which can’t be rightly applied to the animal - ‘witty’, for example, seems to
require a level of linguistic sophistication.
In lieu of a mentalistic account of the animal life, Heidegger presents us with the
notion of worldhood poverty. This seems initially to be following in a long line of
philosophers who have tried to depict humans as ‘superior’ to other animals, but I
don’t think that is his intention. At the very least, it is not what I am attempting to
pursue in this thesis. In my view, there is no point denying that I am approaching the
question of the animal from an anthropocentric perspective - I am a human being,
providing a phenomenology of my experience shaped by a human culture and made
possible on the basis of my being-in-the-world. I am personally not sure what
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addressing the animal question ‘objectively’ without anthropocentricism would entail,
or even that such an idea is coherent.
So, what do I mean when I say that the animal is poor in world? This claim is based
solely on the phenomena that I experience. Consider my relationship with my shiny
new leather shoes. For me, they belong to a contexture of human activity - I put them
on before I leave my flat in order to make a good impression at the interview for the
sake of getting a particular job. What relationship does my dog have to those shoes? It
would seem that he relates to them largely as a chew toy. Notice that there is a
similarity between that equipmental transgression and Chaplin’s shoe based dinner in
the Gold Rush. However, the tramp still conforms more broadly to the conventions of
human dining - he cuts the shoe at the dinner table (practical context), with a knife
and fork in-order to eat them for-the-sake of satiating his hunger. There is no
question that he is still in the world with his large, hungry companion. My dog, by
contrast, does not participate in the same interlocking practices, equipment and skills
for using them. Whilst it is right to say that he lives amongst me and my flatmate, it
would be misleading to say that he is in-the-world with me in the same way that my
flatmate is.
I have previously claimed that language was indicative of a creature (or object) being
anthropic, so now is perhaps the time to clarify precisely what I mean by this. Let’s
imagine that I have a brief conversation with a goat. I visit a local farm and the goat
(let’s call him Billy) says, “Shaun, my friend! How are you? You look well. I’m afraid I
am rather busy at the moment but we should go for lunch sometime soon. Let me get
my diary…” This short speech is deceptively dense, and indicative of Billy’s being-inthe-world. First, his being busy and attending to schedules implies a similar way to
dividing up time as we do - this has implications in terms of Dasein’s temporality
which I don’t want to go into at the moment,47 but it is very likely that a creature who
makes use of a diary in the same way that we do has a similar understanding of ‘time’.
Second, there is the issue of sincerity - is Billy really busy, or does he just want to
escape an awkward encounter? Should I read into his response that he doesn’t really
like me? Third, the convention of ‘going for lunch’ probably entails at very least a trip
47
The issue of temporality will be addressed indirectly throughout this thesis and probably in most depth in §7.3.
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to Pret a Manger, which implicates the contexture of equipment and skills for dining
discussed earlier. Fourth, the phrase, ‘you look well’, is sometimes employed
euphemistically to mean that the person has put on weight. If that was Billy’s
intention, then this means that he understands the inappropriateness of just saying
‘you’ve got fatter’, and he understands that there are ways of conveying that sentiment
whilst maintaining a socially acceptable tone. A similar thing is at play when someone
asks ‘would you like to come back for coffee?’ after a date - both play on the implicit
aspects of communication which is only grasped tacitly by socially proficient adults.
In fact, one of the reasons I think the ‘stupid outsider’ is such a staple in comedy is
because it allows an exploitation of the tacit communication that we all take for
granted.
There is, in my view, no question that Billy is an anthropic goat. If he had just bleated,
defecated and tried to eat my t-shirt, I would not be so confident. My claiming that he
is anthropic is not made on the basis that he ‘has a mind like ours’, but rather displays
the sort of being-in-the-world that we take for granted. It must be noted that there are
things that both humans and animals do - eat, sleep and defecate, for example - but
we humans have a complex structure of equipment and etiquette which we do not
share with the other animals. My basic claim here is that they do not eat at tables,
sleep in beds and use lavatories - in short, they do not have projects and as such they
are not in-the-world with us. Moreover, in Heideggerean terms, they don’t do so
because they lack an understanding of Being and their Being is not at issue for them.
What is lacking in the animal is the whole care structure - it does not comport itself in
the world and does not have projects in the same way that we do.
Much in the same way that the anthropic object is one which is in the world with us,
so too is the anthropic animal. Most of the work of Disney utilises anthropic animals
to a greater or lesser extent (Mickey Mouse being the most famous example), but one
example I find particularly interesting is the character of Brian in the television show
Family Guy. He is one of the most intelligent and articulate characters in the family
despite being a dog amongst humans, and for the most part his ‘way of life’ is very
anthropic. I would claim that much of the humour of Brian’s character comes from
the sudden imposition of dog traits on his broadly anthropic persona. One example of
this is in ‘Brian Goes Back to College’, in which he considers dropping out of
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university, in response to which Lois ‘persuades’ him to return by hoovering the
lounge. Such adversity to the vacuum cleaner, though common in dogs, is
incongruous in such an anthropic character - most of us don’t make life choices out of
fear of household appliances.48
In conclusion, I want to claim that whilst Heidegger is correct in his assertion that the
animal life is characterised by worldhood poverty, the anthropic animal found in
fiction is one which, like the anthropic object, can rightly be described as Dasein. That
is, it has an understanding of Being and its own Being is an issue for it. Ontically, the
anthropic animal might go to university, sing with Frank Sinatra Jr.49 or any number
of comic scenarios, possible on the basis of the understanding of Being outlined in the
beginning of this chapter. As such, we will take up the issue of the anthropic animal
with sustained phenomenology in chapter 6.
3.4 Conclusion
Let us finish by looking at the key claims that I made in this chapter, which was
divided into four sections.
First, I looked at Heidegger’s claim regarding Dasein’s understanding of Being and
the ontic/ontological distinction. The former is important because I claim that the
defining characteristic of the anthropic object and the anthropic animal is this
understanding of being, and its being mattering to it. In this way, I claim that both the
anthropic object and anthropic animal are examples of Dasein, and therefore require
phenomenological analysis.
Second, I looked at embodiment and claimed that embodiment can encompass both
the biological limb and the object. Moreover, I claimed that whilst the object failing
discloses the referential totality, the biolimb failing discloses one’s own limitedness.
The former is the central theme of the fourth chapter, and the latter is central theme
of the seventh. Additionally, I claimed that there are serious limits to the cognitive
48
49
This ‘ontological incongruity’ will be addressed directly in §6.6
Another plot line in Family Guy featuring Brian.
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science approach, and as such these themes will be taken up with sustained
phenomenology.
Third, I looked at the case of the anthropic object, which I define in terms of
Heidegger’s being-in-the-world. In this section, I argued that both semiotics and
‘mind-reading’ were unsuited to the task of getting to grips with the phenomena, a
task which I will undertake in the fifth chapter of this thesis.
Finally, I looked at the issue of the animal, traditionally characterised by worldhood
poverty, before moving on to the issue of the anthropic animal. As with the case of the
anthropic object, I claimed that the phenomena of the anthropic animal can only be
understood in terms of being-in-the-world, a task which I will undertake with
sustained phenomenology in the sixth chapter of this thesis.
At this point the reader may get the sense that there is about to be a shift in my
approach. This chapter concludes ‘part one’ of my thesis, which was intended to set
out the critical framework for the way that I am addressing the phenomena in
question. Now that the framework is established, I will look at the four main strands
of the inquiry - anthropic objects, failed objects, failed bodies and anthropic animals from a purely phenomenological perspective, using case studies to frame and focus
the inquiry. In this way, it is my intention that the chapters that follow will further
elucidate and develop the ideas that I have presented thus far.
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Part Two – Phenomenological Component
4. Phenomenology of Dysfunctional and Deficient Objects
This chapter marks the beginning of Part Two of this thesis, in which I will engage in
sustained phenomenological analysis of case studies. In this particular chapter, my
case studies will primarily be the use of objects in Chaplin’s films, and my intention is
to draw out the way in which the object’s dysfunction discloses the referential
structure outlined previously. One thing that may strike the reader from the outset is
the way in which I am focussing on rather banal examples of everyday object use. The
reason for this is not a lack of imagination on my part, but rather because of my belief
- following Heidegger - that because of its everydayness, the interactions we have with
these objects have been wrongfully neglected in the western intellectual tradition. In
order to understand the extraordinary object manipulation found in the puppet
theatre (a project I will undertake in the next chapter), we need to start by getting a
handle on the very ordinary object manipulation with which we are constantly
engaged. In looking at the very quotidian objects that we use in our everyday life, I
hope to emphasise the way in which, despite being fundamental to our going about
our business, they aren’t really salient. As an example, before opening up my word
processor and starting to type this, I found myself rather peckish and took a quick trip
to the supermarket. As it happens, at no point during this endeavour did I encounter
equipmental failure, and as such it is hard to notice the complexity underlying this
ostensibly very simple task.
To begin, I put on my boots, which have fortunately been sufficiently worn in so that
getting them on and off is no longer as strenuous as it once was. Similarly, because
they have been worn in, I no longer get the nagging pain that usually accompanies the
first few weeks of wearing Doc Martins. In short, they are transparent. Crucially,
whilst I was listening to the radio I managed to tie my laces with a level of
automaticity that I could not achieve when I was six years old. I still remember clearly
the struggle that I had developing this skill, and the little chant that I used to say to
myself as a reminder of the stages. Now, like many other of the tasks I do with objects
every morning, I tend not to give it a second thought. The last time I became aware of
the laces routine was when one lace broke a few months ago and as a result I had to
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make my way back from central London with an irritatingly loose boot at the end of
my leg.
Once the boots are on and fastened, I swing my overcoat on with similar automaticity.
Indeed, I seldom notice coat in use, and the last time I was aware of it as a
problematic thing was a few weeks ago when it fell off its hanger in the dark corridor
and I tripped over it on my way to the bathroom. By contrast, this time it was
unproblematic, and I would guess that (at most) a couple of seconds lapsed between
me deciding that the weather necessitated the garment and me wearing it.
Now, to cover my whole journey to the supermarket, my navigation through the
frankly garish christmas displays and the successful unpacking, preparation and
consumption of the food would prove rather tiresome. Nonetheless, my having done
all this with my attention divided fairly equally between my pangs of hunger and the
comic musings of Sandi Toksvig50 demonstrates the deep taken-for-grantedness of my
everyday dealings with objects. Hopefully, any reader who takes a few moments to
reflect on their own actions prior to reading this51 will notice a similarity between my
experience and their own. If the carrier bag had broken on my way back from the
supermarket, or if the store had run out of apples, or if I had slipped on some orange
juice spilt in aisle three, then it would have been a more interesting - and perhaps
more amusing - account of my interactions with objects. Alas, it seems that at the
moment the objects around me aren’t failing. Indeed, it is perhaps worth noting that
the fact that you are reading this sentence is indicative of the fact that things are going
fairly smoothly, as it would only take one incident with a cup of coffee for my
computer to become unusable.52
The main part of this chapter will look at concrete examples of object dysfunction,
largely from within the physical comedy tradition, specifically focussing on comical
cases which exemplify what Heidegger identifies as the three modes of the unready-
I was listening to the News Quiz on my mp3 player.
Or, indeed, whilst reading it! After all, normally the reader pays attention to the ideas, not the device.
52 A friend of mine recently lost the ‘h’ key on his laptop’s keyboard, which means that he has to copy and paste the
letter from a word document any time he wants to use it. I would have more sympathy for his plight had he not lost
the letter in such a ridiculous manner, which he has asked that I don’t share.
50
51
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to-hand object.53 However, before we can get a handle on that phenomena, I feel it is
first necessary to look at the cases of deliberate misuse, or equipmental
transgressions. In my view, such misuse makes us aware of the tacit structure that
underpins our everyday interactions with objects, the referential context. As such,
there is much to be gained from phenomenological analysis of such transgression, and
those insights will hopefully help to frame the inquiry going forward.
4.1 Equipmental Transgressions
To begin, let us recall a central claim that I made about the object in §1.1.2,
specifically that it forms part of a referential context in which the hammer relates to
the nails, the work bench and a whole contexture of activity surrounding its use.
Crucially, the object is not primarily understood in terms of isolable properties, such
as mass, but rather in terms of its suitability for the task a hand. So, to recall the
structure outlined in the last chapter, we might say that I pick up the brussel sprout at
the dinner table with a fork in order to eat it as a step towards having a nice
meal for the sake of satiating my hunger.54 Now, we need to acknowledge that
whilst this ‘for the sake of’ is an anthropological universal (we all get hungry), the
equipment surrounding this ‘for the sake of’ is not. We know of other cultures that use
chopsticks, which they are undoubtedly more adept at using than I am. Indeed, I
recently had to endure the embarrassment of fumbling with chopsticks in a sushi
restaurant whilst the friends eating with me were demonstrating an enviable level of
aptitude. In such a circumstance, I would argue it is correct so say that their
relationship with the object is fundamentally different to mine - the conversation with
my friends fell into the background as I tried to get the two sticks to bend to my will.
Undoubtedly I went through a similar process as a child when my parents were
forcing me to use a fork instead of the chubby digits which seemed far more adept at
getting the food, but I have no such recollection. When I am using the fork
proficiently, as I like to think I do most mealtimes, the whole referential context fades
into the background and I can concentrate on my conversation. Object failure and
To use the Heideggerean terminology, the unready-to-hand.
As I mentioned previously, strictly speaking ‘satiating my hunger’ is not a for-the-sake-of in the Heideggerean
sense. This will be problematised in §6.1.1, but for the moment it is a necessary fudge to avoid a lengthy digression.
53
54
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misuse, and the subsequent disclosure of the referential context, is the bread-andbutter of the clowning tradition and I believe that this is exemplified brilliantly by the
work of Charlie Chaplin. Let us turn now to the Gold Rush, specifically the
thanksgiving scene, which I will proceed to describe in detail.55
A title card comes onscreen which says ‘Thanksgiving Scene’. We see the Tramp pull a
shoe out of a pot of boiling water, which he examines and uses a fork to ensure that it
is cooked. Big Jim passes him a serving plate and, after removing a little dirt from the
plate, the Tramp puts the shoe on there. The camera cuts to a shot of the Tramp’s feet,
one without a shoe. We cut back to the Tramp who places the serving plate with shoe
on the table and then he sharpens the knife as one would if about to carve a turkey.
He pulls away the shoelaces and puts them on a side plate, then he separates leather
from the sole, and puts the leathery part on a separate plate. The Tramp hands the
sole with nails to his large companion, who promptly swaps the plates. Big Jim looks
at the shoe with disdain. The Tramp nibbles a little bit and then turns to Jim, nodding
as if to say ‘it’s not bad.’
Jim looks down at his piece, again with disdain, which contrasts with the Tramp’s
attitude towards his meal. Jim reluctantly bites and chews the leather. The camera
turns back to the Tramp who looks as if he is having a fine meal - he twirls the
shoelaces onto his fork like spaghetti before lifting them into his mouth. The Tramp
then puts the nails onto a side plate, as one would the bones of a turkey. We turn back
to Jim, who is reluctant and repulsed, and then return once more to the Tramp who is
sucking the ‘meat’ off the ‘bones’ (i.e. leather off the nails). He picks up a bent nail
and, after sucking it clean, holds it in his pinky and directs it towards Jim, as if it were
a wishbone. Jim ignores him, so he tries to break it himself, which he is unable to do
so he places it on the side plate. After the Tramp has a small bout of indigestion, the
scene fades.
Now, it is hopefully clear how the structure outlined previously is applicable to the
scene here. We might say that the Tramp prods the shoe at the stove with a fork in
order to check its edibility as a step towards eating it for the sake of satiating his
55
See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 1 - ‘Gold Rush I’
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hunger. What is incongruous about this scene is the fact that the shoe is in a
referential context to which it does not normally belong. This fact is highlighted by the
shot of the Tramp’s feet. There are innumerable shots which feature the Tramp’s
unreasonably large shoes in the scenes prior to this one, and yet they aren’t really a
salient part of the picture. In fact, this is a notable characteristic of his costume - his
attire seems so in-keeping with his character, that it seems appropriate that he should
be wearing it even though it is deeply unsuitable for the harsh snowy conditions. By
pointing at its absence, the shot of the shoeless foot highlights the usual context in
which the shoe is situated and this makes us better positioned to appreciate the
incongruity of the meal we are about to witness.
The title card sets up the frame of reference - we are witnessing a ‘thanksgiving
dinner’. However, there is a marked difference in how the two characters relate to
this. The Tramp seems absorbed in this fiction- for him the shoe is turkey, the nail is a
wishbone and so on. By contrast, Big Jim never stops relating to the shoe as a shoe.
His grimaces are indicative of the disgustingness of his meal, and moreover of the
desperate low to which he has sunk. The camera cutting between the two men
highlights this incongruity - frame of reference 1 (a pleasant thanksgiving feast) is
incompatible with frame of reference 2 (two desperately hungry men eating whatever
they can). Yet, the Tramp tries to push them together. When Jim refuses to play
along, for example when he doesn’t even try to break the wishbone with his
companion, he undercuts the ‘illusion’ and highlights the transgression. There is a
good reason why we don’t normally eat our shoes - it is deeply unpleasant! Unlike the
Tramp, Big Jim seems unprepared to forget that.
The reader might at this point be wondering why we need the Heideggerean concept
of referential contexts to understand this phenomena. After all, everyone can
appreciate the unpleasantness of eating shoes. However, my point is deeper than that
- I want to claim that in order for the shoe be ‘reimagined’ as a component of a
Thanksgiving feast, it needs to be removed from the referential context in which it is
normally situated. Moreover, relating to the shoe qua turkey requires that it is
integrated with the interlocking practices and equipment surrounding Thanksgiving
turkeys. Whilst I don’t think it is possible to make this structure wholly explicit, I
want to claim that the utility of looking at cases of misuse and failure is that they
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make this structure salient, whereas normally it is completely unnoticed. Indeed, it
needs to be unnoticed in order for us to keep going about our business. As I noted in
reference to my unsuccessful attempt to use chopsticks (a case of dysfunction rather
than transgression), everything grinds to a halt when it is not. If I am struggling to get
the sushi into my mouth, my attention is drawn away from the very interesting
discussion about Arts Council funding policy and towards the damn chopsticks. They
almost rise to the status of agents as they seem to thwart the very basic project of
eating, and yet one is compelled to keep trying, as it would be unseemly to use one’s
fingers and embarrassing to ask for a fork.56 This failure and its subsequent saliency
will be the subject of the next section, which will focus primarily at the object
dysfunction, and the three types of failure that Heidegger identifies.
4.2 The Three Types of Unreadiness-to-hand
In order to outline the three modes of object dysfunction, it might be wise to turn
once more to Dreyfus, who spends more time elucidating this idea than Heidegger
himself and draws out a rather useful table of the various modalities.
56
The issue of embarrassment, and how it fits in with one’s self-interpretations, will be addressed in §6.1.1
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(Dreyfus 1997:124-5)
In the first column we see ‘availableness’, and whilst this terminology has not been
used before now, the idea should be familiar. When the equipment is functioning
smoothly, we are able to be absorbed in the practical activity with which we are
engaged. What is important to note is that in this modality there is no subject-object
dichotomy and no reflective awareness. I am simply in the world, going about my
business being absorbed in the many activities which matter to me. Below that in the
table we have the ‘deficient’ modalities. It is only when the object breaks or I engage
in a reflective attitude towards it that there is a subject - either ‘self sufficient’, as is
the case in pure reflection, or with ‘mental content on a non-mental background’. This
is highly atypical, as for the most part I am simply absorbed in the projects with which
I am engaged.
However, what is of particular interest to my inquiry are the three sorts of
equipmental dysfunctions that Dreyfus outlines. For the sake of clarity, I will use
Dreyfus’ terms with the Heideggerean correlate in parentheses. First, there is a
malfunction (conspicuous) in which a particular characteristic of the object prevents
it from fulfilling its function optimally. The example that Dreyfus uses is the hammer
being too heavy, which of course means too heavy for the task at hand. There is a good
reason why the phrase ‘use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut’ has negative
connotations and what is at stake is not the mass of the object, but rather its
suitability for the task. When objects fail in this way, what becomes salient is that
characteristic - in this example, the heaviness of the sledgehammer. Similarly, when I
lean on an object and it cannot hold my weight, this characteristic of the object comes
to the fore - it doesn’t have the strength which I previously assumed and its failure
highlights this aspect of it. In this way, we can understand why Heidegger chose to
talk of conspiciousness - its opposite, inconspicuousness, is a normal characteristic of
a chair. If it is a nice, fully functioning chair, we can just ignore it when we are sat
down reading or watching television. It is only when it malfunctions that the chair is
‘conspicuous’.
Second, there is ‘temporary breakdown’ (obstinate). When the head falls off the
hammer, one has to stop hammering and try to fix it. This failure discloses the whole
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contexture of equipment surrounding the activity - the hammer relates to the nails
that need hammering, the workbench and ultimately to Dasein’s own project which
has been disrupted by this dysfunction.
Finally, there is a permanent breakdown (obtrusive). As Dreyfus’ formulation
suggests, there is a relatedness between this sort of failure and the previous variety.
One of the crucial differences between the two varieties is our stance. In cases of
temporary breakdown the problem is overcome - we either fix the problem or adapt
the task. In permanent breakdown, by contrast, the issue is insurmountable, and the
most typical response is standing before the problem helplessly. The most obvious
example of this in comedy is in Laurel and Hardy - the moments when one of them
(usually Hardy) looks helplessly straight at the camera with pleading eyes.57 I will go
on to argue that there is another - possibly more delightful - response to this within
popular comedy, and that is impotent fury. However, we should not get distracted by
the various permutations, and I feel that at this point I should be explicit in stating
that I am not trying to draw out an exhaustive taxonomy of dysfunctions - I find it
quite feasible that Heidegger missed one, and the divisions between them are rather
fuzzy from the outset. Instead of fretting about such matters, we need to look at
concrete examples in order to understand what Heidegger and Dreyfus mean, thereby
getting a handle on the explanatory power of the concepts.
4.2.1 Equipmental Malfunction (Conspicuousness)
Let’s begin by looking at a scene from Modern Times in which our two homeless
protagonists, the Tramp and his female companion, are delighted to find themselves a
home. I will now describe what happens the first time the Tramp enters the house, but
it is highly advisable that the reader watches the clip before reading on.58
The Tramp and his companion enter their new home, effectively an old shack rather
similar to the one featured in The Gold Rush. As the Tramp closes the door behind
57 Ricky Gervais openly acknowledges that this has been a large influence on his comedy, and was part of the
reason why he chose a mock-documentary conceit for The Office. There are many moments throughout the series
where an exasperated character looks straight at the camera.
58 See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 2 - ‘Modern Times’
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him, a plank falls down and hits him on the head. Whilst his companion is putting the
plank back, The Tramp sits on the table which collapses under his weight. After
picking himself up, he pulls out a broom and half of the roof comes down (it turns out
that the broom was propping up the roof). His companion then wedges the roof back
in place with the broom declaring, “of course, it’s no Buckingham Palace”. The Tramp
then leans on the wall, which he falls straight through and into the pond outside. Fade
out.
This is quite a concatenation of failures, all of which I would argue are cases of what
Dreyfus calls ‘malfunctions’. First, we have the plank falling on him, which I would
argue is a brilliant example of an object suddenly becoming salient. Previously, I
hadn’t even noticed the plank above the door - it literally faded into the background.
When the Tramp closes the door, it suddenly loses its inconspicuous character and we
are aware of it. Second, the Tramp tries to sit on the table and it collapses beneath his
weight. In this case, we have a fantastic example of the failure disclosing an aspect of
the object - the Tramp assumed that the table was capable of supporting his weight,
and when it failed him he suddenly discovered he was mistaken. Third, the roof,
which the Tramp discovers is actually lodged in place by the broom. Once again, the
roof was literally in the background of our attention until it collapse, and I was as
surprised as the Tramp was when it fell down. Fortunately it was almost as easy to put
the roof back as it was to make it fall. Finally, the pièce de résistance, the Tramp
falling through the ostensibly solid wall. At this point, it would probably be logical to
question precisely how this structure stays upright, but I suspect that would rather
ruin the fun. Instead, let us notice once more how the object’s failure points to the
Tramp assuming greater functionality than the object possesses. Moreover, another
background feature suddenly becomes salient in a rather amusing fashion. It must be
noted that this sort of assumption is often the basis of the Tramp’s pratfalls, with
another notable example being in The Gold Rush, in which he tries to lean casually on
his cane, with the effect that the cane goes right into the thick snow and the Tramp
falls over. In this case, it is the ground itself which fails to be as sturdy as he assumes.
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Before moving on from malfunctions, I want to look at a another case which I think
exemplifies the category, again from The Gold Rush.59 In this scene, the Tramp is
dancing with a beautiful woman (who is trying to make her lover jealous) and, much
to his irritation, his trousers keep slipping down. Several times he tries to discretely
pull them up - first with his hands, then with his cane - and when the girl’s friend
interrupts the dance to talk to her for a moment, the Tramp ties a piece of rope he
sees on a table around his waist. It turns out to be a lead with a dog attached to it.
The dog follows the couple around the dance floor a couple of times before the Tramp
notices. He tries to kick the dog away but then the dog notices a cat on the dance floor,
which it pursues - dragging the Tramp to the floor in the process.
Now, although the Tramp being dragged across the dance floor is rather amusing, I
am more interested in the little malfunction of the trousers as it seems to me that this
is an example that we can all relate to. Whether it is because of a faulty belt or because
one has lost a few pounds since last wearing them, sometimes one’s trousers don’t
stay up as well as one would like. Now, this malfunction isn’t as severe as falling
through a chair but it does have a certain similarity. If your trousers keep slipping
down, they are not as inconspicuous as you would like. It seems to me that one of the
necessary features of a good pair of trousers is that you can simply put them on and
then forget about them. If your trousers prevent you from dancing, talking to your
friend or carrying a sofa back to your flat, then there is a sense in which they have
malfunctioned. Of course, this malfunction does not always result in hilarious
consequences, nor does it necessarily make an interesting anecdote, but nonetheless I
thought it important to outline this rather humdrum malfunction to press the point
that not all malfunctions are extravagant as falling through a wall. In fact, I am
personally drawn to clowns who can pick up on the minutiae of everyday life - making
a five minute routine out of very everyday failures rather than requiring rather
elaborate contraptions which eventually break down.60
See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 3 - ‘The Gold Rush II’
I think Dr. Brown is a great example of a clown who plays with the minutiae. He is also wonderfully
transgressive, especially in the manner that he plays with food.
59
60
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4.2.2 Temporary Breakdown (Obstinate)
Let us turn now to the second type of failure - the temporary breakdown. According to
Dreyfus’ chart, there are two defining features of the temporary breakdown. The first
is what is encountered, specifically the interconnectedness of equipment in what we
have been calling the referential context. And the second is one’s stance towards this
failure, which is one of practical deliberation - one works to eliminate the problem.
Now, the former feature is of particular interest to me, as I argued previously that the
referential context is constitutive of ‘theatrical imaginativeness’. By this, I mean that
when the Tramp invites us to reimagine the shoe as a turkey in the thanksgiving scene
in The Gold Rush, or - as I will argue in §5.1 - the puppeteer invites us to see life in an
inanimate object, fundamental to this phenomena is that the object is situated in a
novel referential context. If this is the case, then there is a great deal to be learned
from theatrical failures, as they have the potential to disclose this referential context
and therefore the very machinations on which the scene relies.61 It is perhaps fitting,
then, that some of the best examples of this takes place in stage magic, in which the
illusion relies on such a close precision that if an object becomes salient slightly too
early the whole effect is ruined. Of course, Tommy Cooper developed a very successful
career by getting laughs out of such failures, and Mr. Bean has a rather comic
encounter with a stage magician in Mr. Bean Goes To Town. However, I want to focus
on Chaplin’s The Circus. Once again, it is recommended that the reader watches the
scene in question before continuing.62
In The Circus, the Tramp gets a job in the circus after he steals the show accidentally
whilst fleeing the police. After initially trying out as a clown but finding he can’t be
funny deliberately, the ringmaster decides to give him a job as a stage hand, and all he
has to do is take objects on and off in between acts. In one scene, the Tramp has to
help another stage hand get the magician’s table into the ring. After doing so, he falls
into a barrel. After recovering he adjusts the table, accidentally pressing a button
which makes a top hat appear out of the table and then several birds come of the hat.
61 Both Ridout’s Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems and Bailes’ Performance Theatre and the
Poetics of Failure discuss failure’s capacity to disclose the machinations of performance, but I want to suggest that
this phenomenon can be better understood in terms of a broader consideration of the potential that failure has to
disclose the referential totality that underpins everyday intelligibility.
62 See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 4 - ‘The Circus’
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Then out of a preset hat a balloon starts inflating. Two rabbits come out of the hat
after the birds and then the balloon pops. Cut to the audience who are laughing
hysterically. Cut back to the Tramp, who is shocked to see a goose come out of the hat
now. Then another goose comes out of the balloon hat and another rabbit comes out
of the first hat, which he tries to catch. As he is putting the rabbit into the second hat,
a bird - perhaps a chicken - flies out of the first hat. Cut to the magician looking
aghast, and then back at the Tramp who is bamboozled by a plethora of animals
coming out of both hats. As it cuts back and forth between the troubled Tramp (who is
trying desperately to keep on top of the situation) and the magician, we see piglets,
birds and balloons all appear. With an air of resignation, the Tramp nods
appreciatively to the audience before a horse runs at him. He falls over the table,
flipping it over to reveal more animals and a man hidden underneath.
So, I would argue that part of the reason that this scene is so amusing is the futile way
in which the Tramp tries to sort out the problem - he puts animals back in the hat,
and there is a noticeable deliberation going on. This contrasts with the scene in
Modern Times in which the table collapses under his weight - in that case, he simply
picked himself up. In this scene, he is compelled to try to sort out the problem, despite
him not being very adept at doing so. Furthermore, this failure discloses the
machinations of stage magic - it becomes clear to everyone watching that when the
illusionist pulls a rabbit out of the hat, he is not bringing it into existence through an
act of pure volition. Rather, his doing so is reliant on a contraption, the workings of
which are completely opaque to the audience when all is going smoothly.
At this point, it might be worth addressing an obvious question. In what sense is it
correct to claim that the magician’s table is dysfunctional? If one assumes that the
mistake in the scene was simply that the Tramp pressed the button when he shouldn’t
have, and the table is doing what it normally does, someone might argue quite
reasonably that the table was functioning correctly. However, that presupposes that
the table’s functionality is self-contained, whereas I want to argue that we need to
understand the functionality in terms of the referential context. When the Tramp
walks into the ring with the table, he has the role of a stage hand, and the magician
wants the table to be understood by the audience as a simple table on which a few
unremarkable inanimate objects are resting. Ideally, the magician would like the
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audience to believe that he could do the trick on any table, or even on the floor, and in
that way the table needs to be a background feature of the trick. Indeed, if the
stagehands were noticeably more careful around the button area or if they seemed to
find it heavier than the other tables they have brought on, the audience would start to
suspect that it was a special table and it would be more salient than the magician
would like. In such circumstances, although it seems strange, we might legitimately
claim that it is dysfunctional.
So, I want to claim that the table doesn’t fail in the sense that it does something it
shouldn’t do, for example, collapse. Rather, it fails in the sense that what it does is not
what it ought to do with regard to the referential context in which it is situated.
Indeed, I would go as far as to claim that when we talk of an object functioning in
such a normative manner, the judgement is based on the referential structure
outlined previously. What an object ‘ought’ to do is defined by the contexture of
activity surrounding it. The magician’s table at one point ought to act like any other,
and at another point it ought to inflate balloons. Crucially, I want to claim that this is
an issue of ontology.
Whilst the most common response to temporary breakdown in Chaplin’s comedy is
the Tramp trying to eliminate the problem with little success, that does not
necessitate that this sort of comic failure precludes successful adaptation. Indeed,
Carroll (2009) argues that a key motif in Keaton’s work is the ‘successful adaptation’
gag - that is, we laugh when Keaton successfully eliminates the disturbance against
the odds. To illustrate, I want to look very briefly at a key moment in Keaton’s The
General.63
In this scene, Johnnie Gray is driving a train in pursuit of some Union spies who have
inadvertently kidnapped his girlfriend. The spies start throwing timber onto the
tracks in an attempt to derail Johnnie's train. So, Johnnie is confronted with a large
piece of timber on the tracks. Johnnie climbs to the front of the train and then runs
out in front of it and tries to remove the timber. He manages, but not before the train
scoops him up so he is sat on the front of the train with a big piece of timber. He then
63
See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 5 - ‘The General’
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throws the first piece of timber at the second piece, successfully overcoming the
obstacle and avoiding derailing.
Although it might not seem natural to refer to the timber on the train tracks as
‘unready-to-hand’, I think I am justified in doing so. What I want to highlight is that
the object is not ‘unhandy’ only in cases when the head falls off the hammer or when
the car won’t start, but rather at any point when the object gets in the way of one’s
projects. We need to avoid construing the notion of the ‘unready-to-hand’ as simply
something breaking - Heidegger extends this notion to the object which is missing,
after all. This is only coherent if one understands the unready-to-hand more broadly
than simply as being a synonym for breakage. So, to focus on the example from the
General, the piece of wood on the tracks stands in the way of his main ‘towards-which’
(goal), i.e. capturing the spies. If he cannot eliminate this disturbance, then his train
may crash, the spies may escape and ultimately the Confederate Army might lose the
war. Moreover, this disturbance highlights the whole referential context on which this
project is situated. We could say that he chases the spies on the railway with a steam
train in order to stop them returning to base for the sake of furthering the cause
of the Confederate Army. Thus, the timber on the tracks is just as ‘unready-to-hand’
as the train would be if it broke down.
So, we have seen that the notion of the unready-to-hand includes both the table that is
too weak to hold my weight and the timber on the railway tracks which may result in a
crash. In the case of the former, I might just dust myself off and in the case of the
latter, I might have to act very quickly to resolve the issue. Of course, the line
separating the two varieties is rather fuzzy. Under Dreyfus’ formulation, it seems like
the distinction between the obstinate and the obtrusive is even fuzzier - both are
referred to as ‘breakdowns’ by Dreyfus, with the main terminological distinction being
its permanence. The permanent breakdown, then, is perhaps a misnomer - the object
which one has lost might at some point be found, and it seems peculiar to use
‘breakdown’ in reference to an object which is functional but misplaced. The crucial
characteristic in this third variety seems to be that the activity with which we are
engaged has to cease - I can’t put up the shelves because I’ve lost the screwdriver; I
can’t go to Mabel’s wedding because the car won’t start. Although when it happens to
us in everyday life there’s very little to laugh at, there are clear examples in comedy in
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which I think this is at play,64 so let us turn our attention to obstinacy in popular
comedy.
4.2.3 Permanent Breakdown (Obtrusive)
As I noted previously, it is this Obstrusiveness that is a common theme in the work of
Laurel and Hardy and I would argue that it is at play in Ollie’s famous ‘camera look’ in
which he stares desperately at the camera. As an example, take the scene in Busy
Bodies in which Stan manages to wedge both of Ollie’s hands in a window frame.
After demanding that Stan helps him, Ollie notices Stan referring to blueprints. Ollie
explains that these blueprints are for the Boulder Dam and then gives us an
exasperated look as if too say, ‘look what I have to put up with!’65 Crucially, in this
example, they cannot continue with their activity until the hands are free - if the
problem is not overcome then Ollie cannot continue, and in fact he will probably have
to go to the hospital to have his hands freed.66
Such moments are much rarer in the comedy of Chaplin, and as such I think it is
important to draw them out. The example that I want to focus on, and a fantastic
example of obstinacy, is the ‘Billows Feeding Machine’ in Modern Times.67 According
to the salesman of the machine, it is a practical device which automatically feeds
employees while they work. The inventor decides to give a practical demonstration of
the device, and the boss chooses Chaplin’s character as the unsuspecting volunteer, so
Chaplin is strapped in and ready to go.
First, a bowl of soup is lifted and poured into his mouth, then a sponge swings round
and wipes his mouth, much to his surprise. The machine rotates and a plate of
bitesized nibbles lifts up and then a metal tong pushes the first bite into Charlie’s
64 It is perhaps worth reminding the reader that I am not trying to outline the necessary and sufficient conditions
of humour, and as such it is outside the remit of this thesis to unpick precisely when breakdown results in
laughter. Rather, I am trying to outline the hermeneutic conditions of humour - that is, what needs to be in place
for the situation to be intelligible. In my view, this is the phenomenon of world.
65 See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 6 - ‘Busy Bodies’
66 When I was 9 years old, I rather stupidly handcuffed my right hand to my left ankle and lost the key. My
grandfather had to take me to the fire station where they removed it using a frankly terrifying saw. I missed almost
a whole day of school because of this foolish act, as such I think it is quite right to define this as a ‘permanent
breakdown’, despite the fact that I was eventually freed.
67 See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 7 - ‘Modern Times III’
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mouth. The plate rotates and a second piece is pushed into his mouth, followed by a
third. The plate goes down and the sponge swings round and cleans his mouth again.
The machine rotates, and this time a spinning corn-on-the-cob pops up. As it moves
left to right, Charlie dutifully eats it. Cut to the machine’s salesman who seems rather
impressed with the contraption.
We return to Charlie eating the corn, when suddenly there is the sound of electric
‘fizzing’ and the corn speeds up. Charlie is helpless as corn the spins frantically on his
face. The machine maker does something to the contraption which makes it cease. It
starts up again, stops, and then it attacks again. The salesman is hunched over the
contraption’s controls trying to fix the problem. One of the engineers pulls the corn
away from Charlie’s face, much to his relief. He tells the salesman to try again, and the
corn attacks Charlie once more. The corn attacks repeatedly, with Charlie shouting for
help in between bouts. After the final attack, the sponge calmly swings round and
wipes his mouth. The machine seems to be okay now, so the salesman declares, “We’ll
start with the soup again”.
The soup lifts up and it looks like everything is going well, but then the bowl flops
down and soup spills down Charlie’s front. The sponge swings round, wiping Charlie’s
face. The engineer wants to try once more, so he fills the bowl with soup again and
nods to his colleague to start. This time the bowl shoots up, flinging soup in Charlie’s
face. Once again the sponge swings round - this time it is needed but it is rather
ineffectual (it only wipes the mouth area, not the rest of the rather wet face). Cut to
the salesman who makes a few more adjustments to the machine, leaving two bolts on
the plate with the small portions on it.
The salesman pulls a lever and the machine rotates once more. This time the plate
with food (and bolts) lifts up. First a piece of food is put in Charlie’s mouth, which he
chews, but then a bolt is put in there. Followed by another one, much to his surprise.
The sponge swings round and wipes his mouth, preventing him from spitting the bolts
out in between courses. The contraption turns leaving the pudding in front of Charlie,
then the plate lifts up and plants the pudding in his in his face. The sponge swings
round and once again ineffectually wipes his face. Then there is another problem, and
the sponge swings back and forth beating Charlie in the face. Eventually the
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contraption breaks down completely and Charlie falls out. The factory owner declares,
quite rightly, “It’s no good - it isn’t practical” and walks away.
Now, as mentioned previously, there is one
moment in which I would argue Chaplin is
utilising Hardy’s trademark ‘camera look’.
This look encapsulates what Dreyfus might
call Charlie’s ‘stance’ - he is completely
helpless. He is quite literally strapped into a
machine and at its mercy. It is clear that such
a major breakdown prevents Charlie from undertaking the main project of his lunch
hour (i.e. eating lunch), although he does manage to eat a little before the machine
starts to attack him. Referring back to the structure outlined earlier, we might say that
the boss straps Charlie into the feeding machine with the metal arms in order to
feed him as a step towards increasing productivity for the sake of his being a
successful factory owner. By this criteria it has failed, as the factory owner himself
admits when he says that it is not practical.
There is, of course, a rather unsubtle but important message that Chaplin is making in
this scene and Modern Times more generally, and that is the dehumanising effect of
such mechanisation. Even if we acknowledge that the human giving us an impression
of a thing is amusing, as Bergson famously claimed, we must equally acknowledge
that a human treating another human like a thing is deeply unsettling. However, there
is a more pressing question. Specifically, is Chaplin and Hardy’s response to obstinacy
the only response found in comedy? As I mentioned previously, I don’t believe so. In
order to make this case, I want to turn now to a comic character almost as famous as
the Tramp, Basil Fawlty, whose response to permanent breakdown I want to argue is
characterised by impotent fury.
In the Fawlty Towers episode, Gourmet Night,68 hotel manager Basil is trying to
organise a night of gourmet cuisine in order to attract a higher class of customer.
Unfortunately, the chef has drunk too much and passed out in the kitchen. Basil has
68
See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 8 - ‘Fawlty Towers’
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arranged for another chef to cook the meal (roast duck), which he will pick up from a
restaurant on the other side of town. After the first duck was dropped and trodden on,
an increasingly agitated Basil rushes to pick up a second one. On his way back to the
hotel, Basil’s car breaks down.
Over the choking of the engine, we hear Basil shouting. "Come on! Come on! Start!
Start you vicious bastard! Come on! Oh my god! I'm warning you, if you don't start!
I'll count to three! 1! 2! 3! RIGHT!" Basil then gets out of the car. He starts pointing
aggressively at the car and shouts, "Right, that's it. I've had enough! You've tried it on
just once too often! Right! Well, don't say I haven't warned you! I've laid on the line to
you time and time again! Right! Well, this is it! I'm going to give you a damn good
thrashing.” He turns and runs out of shot. He then returns and beats the car
ineffectually with a branch.
It is impossible to describe this scene in such a way that it does it justice, but it seems
to me that this example - the car not starting - is a paradigmatic case of the
permanent breakdown (obstinacy). We can plot Basil’s project in the referential
structure; Basil drives to the hotel with a car in order to give the guests a fine meal
as a step towards attracting a better standard of clientéle for the sake of
becoming a successful hotel manager. Clearly the car breaking down stands in the way
of that. However, Basil does not simply sit there helplessly and look at us with
pleading eyes, he rages with a hilarious impotence and exacts revenge on the
inanimate car. The ineffectualness of the thrashing is highlighted by the car’s lack of
response and the guests simply waiting longer. It doesn’t do anything to help Basil
achieve his aims, and yet it is a very natural response. Although we probably don’t go
to the same extremes as Basil, I’m sure most of us have exacted our revenge on
inanimate objects, suggesting that perhaps we are not the ‘rational animals’ that we
like to believe ourselves to be.
Before moving away from impotent fury as a response to obstinacy, I want to look
another type of obstinate object - the one which is missing. As a case study for this, I
want to look at Rhod Gilbert’s short routine on his lost suitcase, which I think almost
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matches Basil Fawlty in the impotent fury stakes.69 As this routine is quite language
heavy, I will shift to a more ‘transcriptive’ way of representing it on the page.
I was excited and then I bought myself a brand new suitcase as well, one of the posh
ones with the wheels and then I flew to Dublin. I will show you what I found when I
arrived in Dublin airport just a few hours later. (He produces the handle). That.
*audience laughs* It's not funny! *audience laughs* Anyway, I get the last laugh,
it still works. *audience laughs* You can see where some hilarious baggage handler
has put a 'heavy' label on that, look. *audience laughs* Bend your knees is the
advice to anyone tackling that baby. *audience laughs* Listen, I'm not going to lie
to you, the flight was about £19.99, I wasn't expecting miracles. (Looks at handle)
*audience laughs* If I'm completely honest with you, the first three times this went
round the baggage carousel, I laughed. *audience laughs and claps* Everyone
laughed the first three times it was hilarious - the staff, the passengers, everybody was
having a great time. And then one by one they went home. *audience laughs* It
was just me and this. *audience laughs* I thought I could sort this out. I took this
to the desk. *audience laughs* Marched over, I thought 'I'll sort this out'. I didn't
know what I was up against - the girl at the desk looks at me, no hint of irony, she
says, "what seems to be the problem?". *audience laughs* I said mainly it's about
my luggage. *audience laughs* She said, 'is that not it?' *audience laughs* I said,
'this is some of it'. *audience laughs* Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled to get this
back. *audience laughs* The thing is, I'm here for a month. *audience laughs*
I'm pretty sure I packed more than this. *audience laughs* She started asking me
those questions, you know those questions they ask you at airports? I've heard these
questions all over the world. They are normally perfectly sensible questions. There
was no need for it. She said, ‘could anybody have interfered with it?’ *audience
laughs* I said we probably shouldn't rule that out. *audience laughs* She said,
'have you left it unattended at any point?' *audience laughs* I said, 'I suppose I
must have.' *audience laughs* I'm not the most observant person in the world but
if this had happened while I was wheeling it through the airport I think I would have
noticed. *audience laughs* Surely it would have gone very light very quickly?
*audience laughs* She said, 'did you pack it yourself?' *audience laughs* I
69
‘See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 9 - ‘Rhod Gilbert’
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thought, 'why? what are you suggesting? You think my mother packs for me and
thought this is all I'd need?! *audience laughs*
Now, the stimulus for this rant is an absent object, a fact that is highlighted in the
moments when he walks across the stage holding the handle down behind him like
one would with a suitcase on wheels. Whilst there is perhaps a utility in his going to
the desk to report the bag missing, at the point at which we are hearing the story the
bag is still missing, or at very least we assume that he hasn’t got his luggage back.
Much like the beating that Basil gives his car, the rant Rhod Gilbert performs onstage
does nothing to resolve the issue. Both are futile fist-shakes at a failure which they are
helpless to resolve. However, whereas in Fawlty Towers the fourth wall is always
maintained, the conversational70 nature of stand-up comedy allows Rhod to both
plead like Hardy and rant like Fawlty. When he is describing how, ‘everybody was
having a great time and then one by one they went home’, one imagines Rhod stood in
the airport, helpless and not knowing what to do. Indeed, whether intentionally or
not, he looks straight at the camera in a Hardyesque manner when he delivers that
line. After that he goes into an impotent rant which wrings laughs out of the audience
at an impressive rate - around one big laugh per sentence!
4.3 The Present-at-Hand Modality
Hopefully it is clear at this point how I feel Heidegger’s terminology around the
dysfunctional equipment is useful for understanding the comic phenomena
addressed. As I mentioned previously, my intention is not to outline an exhaustive
taxonomy of types of failure, or even types of gags found in the physical comedy
tradition. There are undoubtedly cases which are somewhere in the grey areas
between the varieties, and there may well be other types of failure which I have not
considered. Let us now turn to the modality at the bottom of Dreyfus’ chart - what he
calls ‘occurentness’, and what I have previously called the present-at-hand.
In the previous sections, I have been drawing the readers attention to specific
moments within Chaplin films - moments which actually make up a small fraction of
70
Or, rather, the pseudo-conversational nature of stand-up comedy.
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the screen-time of the Tramp in those films. In order to do this effectively, I have
provided the reader with a DVD containing only those clips and I have described the
phenomena in the main body of the thesis text. In doing so, there is a sense in which
one could say that I have divorced the scenes from their native referential context.
One could perhaps argue that understanding the shoe eating scene in The Gold Rush
requires that the viewer has watched all the scenes leading up to that moment, so that
we truly understand what is at stake. I completely agree and one of my main
recommendations when approaching this thesis is that the reader has watched all the
case study films in question. However, I understand that the reader (that is to say, the
examiner) may not have either the time or the will to do so, which is why this ‘cherry
picking’ is a necessary evil.
Moreover, I feel that is it important to emphasise how atypical this is as a mode of
engagement with comic phenomena. Usually when I am watching a comic
performance or film, it is a social affair in which I am truly ‘in the moment’. Often I
struggle to breathe because I am laughing so hard. In these moments, I am fully
absorbed in the activity and as such I am not aware of the structures outlined
previously. However, in order for me to highlight the referential structure, I had to
discourage you from engaging with the phenomena in such a manner, which is why
the clips are divorced from their native contexts. This ‘divorced’ mode of engagement
- what Heidegger calls the present-at-hand - is a popular methodological tool of the
natural sciences, but I want to claim that this is also a very popular tool of the
comedian, and the remainder of this chapter will be devoted to making the case for
this claim.
The evolutionary biologist and Radio 4 stalwart Dr. Steve Jones often describes his
job as making sex boring, as is necessary if one wants to critically engage with
reproductive science. I would argue that modern ‘blue’ comedians take a similar
methodological approach, but rather than making reproduction seem clinical and dull
they make it seem strange and amusing. What would happen, then, if one were to do a
similar thing to the practice of stand-up comedy itself? Fortunately, we do not have to
imagine, as that is something I would argue that Stewart Lee has been doing for a
substantial part of his career. In the routine that follows, Lee discusses contemporary
stand-up comedy and the large part that broken objects seem to have in the routines
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of mainstream comedians. Once again, I would recommend that any reader
unfamiliar with the material consult the DVD appendix before reading on.71
What the comedy is now…it's not like the 80's, what it is now, is a load of people and
they all hate their electrical appliances. *audience laughs* And they go out to a
place and there is a guy on stage there and he hates his electrical appliances. And he
goes "I hate my electrical appliances" *audience laughs* And the audience goes "we
hate our electrical appliances as well" and they go home happy, £47.50 well spent.
*audience laughs* "I hate my toaster, it's only got two settings - black burned
charcoal or just warm bread. It's only got two settings." * audience laughs* It's
broken, isn't it? *audience laughs* Mate, that toaster's broken. *audience
laughs* They wouldn't make a toaster like that, would they? They wouldn't, there
would be no market for it. *audience laughs* It would be rejected at the design
stage. *audience laughs* "Mr. Morphy-Richards, I've got a design idea for a new
toaster" "Oh yeah?" "Yes, it either burns the bread black, or it doesn't do anything to it
really." *audience laughs* "We're not going to make that toaster, sir." *audience
laughs* "There would be no market for it. Put the plans in the bin, put them in
there." (Lee pauses) It's broken, isn't it? If you've got a toaster and it either burns the
bread black or it doesn't do anything, it's not a new kind of toaster, it's broken, right.
*audience laughs* Take it back. And they'll change it if you've got a receipt.
This routine seems to be criticising Eddie Izzard’s show, Glorious (1997) which does
have a routine in which he bemoans the fact that his toaster either burns the bread or
does very little to it. However, I think he is doing something more than simply
attacking a fellow comedian. What I think is interesting about this routine is that Lee
makes the audience take a certain stance on the practice of comedy. By putting the
practice of stand-up comedy ‘under the microscope’, Lee is encouraging a ‘present-athand’ engagement with it. Normally, one gets completely absorbed in the gig - when I
first heard the Izzard routine, I found it rather funny, and the last thing I was
concerned with was the process of returning the appliance. In using the practice of
71
See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 10 - ‘Stewart Lee’
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comedy as its subject matter, Lee’s routine encourages a more ‘present-at-hand’ mode
of engagement, one which I think is essential to critical engagement with an activity.72
Let’s move away now from the Ouroboros73 of comedy-about-comedy, and look at the
present-at-hand mode more generally. As I expressed previously, I want to argue that
Dreyfus and Heidegger are right in claiming that when I am fully absorbed in the
activity with which I am engaged, there is no ‘subject’ engaging with a ‘object’ or
‘mental content’ but simply Dasein prereflexively engaging with activities which
matter to it. In the deficient present-at-hand modality, this prereflexive engagement
is disrupted - there is a critical distance between the Dasein and the activity and/or
object. I want to argue that the distance that this stance creates can make the object or
activity seem comical. As I claimed in Chapter 2, the object is not meaningful by
virtue of any internal structure or its components but rather by the referential context
in which it is situated. As such, any stance which divorces an object or activity from its
native context has the potential74 to make it seem meaningless. The example of this
that I gave in 2.6.1 was an article in the mock-newspaper The Onion, in which the U.S.
economy collapses because everyone stops believing in the value of the coins passed
between them. This is also a familiar trope in observational comedy, which I want to
illustrate with a routine from Dylan Moran recorded in 2006, when Arnold
Schwarzenegger was still governor of California.75
Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California. *audience laughs* There's a
perfectly ordinary english sentence. *audience laughs* How did that happen?!
*audience laughs* Do you know how that happened? Coz I'll tell you. You know
how he got into that position? He got there…by lifting things. *audience laughs*
Now, you and me, we avoid lifting things. It's unpleasant. *audience laughs*
Especially heavy things. Even a five year old child knows this. They go, "huh? no, fuck
72 There is, of course, a slight slippage from discussing objects to discussing practices. Whilst I don’t think one can
conflate the two, it is hopefully clear that they are not as distinct as usually construed. The practice of comedy is
situated within a referential context partially constituted by the equipment surrounding it. Our understanding of
the practice and of the equipment are inextricably linked together - what one ‘ought’ to do with a prop is
contextually determined, after all. Moreover, just as you can assume a present-at-hand stance to an object you can
assume the same stance to the practice of which it is a part.
73 Ouroboros is a snake eating its own tail.
74 The natural sciences take this stance towards human interaction and whilst it doesn’t always mean that they
render it comical, I would argue that this entails that they cannot hope to understand what it means for someone
to be ‘in love’, for example, as this cannot be reduced to either an evolutionary imperative or a set of neurons
firing. One of the strengths of Raymond Tallis’ work is his rebuttal of such reductionist strategies in the sciences.
75 See DVD Appendix 1, Clip 11 - ‘Dylan Moran’
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it no. I'm going to put lego up my arse, I'm not doing that. No." *audience laughs*
He took a different approach. He lifted the heavy… And you know, you lift things
when you have to. Piano falls on granny - you lift the piano. Coz granny has mixed
feelings about the whole situation. *laughs* Sunday lunch continues. *audience
laughs* He didn't do any of that! We went right over to the heavy thing and lifted it,
and put it back down and didn't move it anywhere. *audience laughs* And then he
lifted it again, hundreds of times. And said to the people who had stopped to observe
this abhorrent behaviour, "look how good I am at lifting the heavy thing" *audience
laughs* “In my underpants.” *audience laughs* Now that sounds a little dim. But
it was they who said, "you're the man." *audience laughs* "You're the one we want
to deal with immigration and water rates and taxes and all that kind of shit."
*audience laughs, claps and cheers*
What this routine brings out brilliantly is how absurd competitive weight-lifting
seems when one is not invested in that particular activity. I want to argue that is
because Dylan Moran positions himself and us in a referential context exterior to
Schwarzenegger’s, and as such the activity seems pointless. To the outsider, it is a
bunch of men parading around in their underpants picking up heavy things. However,
for the weightlifter, it might be the culmination of years of effort, and he picks up the
weights in the gym with his bare hands in order to build up his biceps as a step
towards perfecting his physique for the sake of being crowned Mr. Universe. This
structure is what makes the activity meaningful to him, and as such the activity is not
wholly intelligible to someone in a position of exteriority - in a very real sense, they
just don’t ‘get it’. In those situations, it seems natural to laugh. It is an obvious truism
that outsiders are well positioned comically, both in the sense that they are easy
subjects of humour (as the prevalence of ‘funny foreigner’ type humour indicates) and
that they are well positioned to make our own practices seem peculiar.
Of course, this does not necessitate that there is an unbridgeable gulf between my
projects and those of Schwarzenegger. I might not have any desire to become Mr.
Universe and he might not have any desire to be a scholar, but we may well have more
projects in common than we do differing ones. Moreover, whatever the project, our
activities and interaction with objects are intelligible only by virtue of the referential
structure that I have tried to outline in this chapter. As long as we understand the
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distorting effect that the present-at-hand modality has on everyday intelligibility,
there is nothing wrong with enjoying the absurdity. However, I would be wary of
certain intellectual traditions which posit such absurdity as a fundamental
characteristic of the human condition.
4.4 Conclusion
I began by looking at what I refer to as 'equipmental transgressions', which I
elucidated with the example of the Thanksgiving Scene in The Gold Rush. After that, I
looked at the three types of object dysfunction (unreadiness-to-hand) that Heidegger
and Dreyfus identify, i.e. Malfunction (Conspicuousness), Temporary Breakdown
(Obstinacy) and Permanent Breakdown (Obtrusiveness).
I argued that in cases of Malfunction (Conspicuousness), what becomes salient is the
problematic characteristic of the dysfunctional object (for example, it’s instability)
and that the most common response to this in Chaplin's work is simply the Tramp
dusting himself off and getting on with what he was doing. Temporary Breakdown
(Obstinate), by contrast, discloses the referential context as the person (usually The
Tramp) deliberates over how to resolve the problem. Crucially, I argued that one
needs to understand the machinations of performance-construction in terms of
referential contexts, and moreover that the Temporary Breakdown has the potential
to disclose these machinations, such as in the case of the magician's table in The
Circus. The Permanent Breakdown (Obtrusive), as the Dreyfus' name suggests, is a
more enduring failure. Although calling it a 'breakdown' is a little misleading as it can
also refer to an object being missing. We saw a that the usual response to this in silent
films is to look helplessly at the camera, but I also made the case that the impotent
fury of a figure such as Basil Fawlty is also a common response to such dysfunctions.
After moving on from the unready-to-hand modality, I looked at what Heidegger calls
the present-at-hand (in Dreyfus' table, the occurrent). I argued that this position has
the potential to make our everyday activity seem strange, perhaps even absurd, and
that this is a common technique in stand-up comedy. In the next chapter, I will look
at the anthropic object, which I want to argue is characterised by being-in-the-world,
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beginning with cases of puppet theatre in which the manipulator is as present on
stage as the puppet.
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5. Phenomenology of Anthropic Objects (and a ‘Real Girl’)
In this chapter, I will look at examples of what I call ‘anthropic objects’ - that is,
‘objects’ that ought to be understood in relation to the phenomenon of ‘being-in-theworld’. I am not committed to the idea that such objects exist ‘in real life’ - as my
treatment of computational humour theory indicated, I think we are a long way off
being able to create truly anthropic robots - but in principle I don’t think it is
inconceivable at some point in the future. Rather than getting caught up in the
current debates about such matters, I want to be clear from the outset that each of my
case studies will be treated with ‘agnosticism’ regarding this issue. My concern isn’t
whether the puppet or robot is an ‘actually-existing-Dasein’, but rather what makes
the object seem ‘object-like’ in some instances and ‘Dasein-like’ in others. My
contention is that often this shift is accompanied by laughter, and that these shifts can
only be understood phenomenologically. I will begin this chapter by looking at Blind
Summit’s production of The Table and relate it to the investigation of failure pursued
in the last chapter. After this, I will work my way through several case studies in order
to build a phenomenology of the anthropic object.
5.1 Failure and Puppet Manipulation
In Blind Summit's production of The Table, there are several features that I want to
argue can be best understood with recourse to the framework that I developed in
previous chapters. Specifically, I want to focus on the status of the eponymous table.
Recall my discussion in chapter two about the table at my parents' home in which I
argued that what made it the 'play table' at one point and the 'dinner table' at another
was the concrete contexture of activity surrounding it - for example, I pick up the
parsnip at the table with a fork in order to eat it as a step toward have a
satisfying meal for the sake of satiating my hunger. As such, I argued that the table
as a site of activity is flexible in its significance and potentially allows for incongruity.
I want to argue that most of the humour in The Table arises out of this flexibility and
the subsequent incongruity.76
76 I was initially tempted to claim that all the humour in the piece is of this variety, but I don’t think this is quite
true. For instance, there is a joke about pythagoras’ theorem which probably doesn’t arise from this flexibility and
subsequent incongruity.
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In this production, Moses, a three-man operated Bunraku style puppet with a
cardboard head and gruff demeanour, openly acknowledges the artifice of the
performance. He states that he has never left the table and openly discloses the
machinations of manipulation - there are several moments when he turns to the
manipulators for agreement or to chastise their abilities as puppeteers. Furthermore,
he outlines the three essential ingredients of puppetry - focus, breath and fixed point
(i.e. the puppet’s movements follow our intuitive understanding of physics77). In
doing so, he integrates the mechanics of puppetry into the dramaturgy of the piece.
He never denies his puppetness, and at one point asserts that he used to be a box. For
him (and, therefore, the audience) alongside its humdrum everydayness, the table is
also present as a site of imagination. At one point, he claims it can become France,
Germany or Egypt as he chooses, and he likes to think of the stage left area of the
table as his garden.
Around halfway through the piece, a mysterious woman comes and sits at the table apparently completely oblivious of Moses’ dramaturgical reality - much to his dismay.
For her, the table is the place at which she sits mournfully flicking through a diary.
When this happens the puppet reacts with shock, insisting that it's his table and she
has no right to be there. He tries shouting at her, kicking her and putting all his
weight behind him in an attempt to shove her off the table, but to no avail. His
diminutive stature and her dramaturgical incongruity conspire to make her an
immovable mountain on his tabletop continent. In the end, his protests and attacks
are as impotent as those Basil Fawlty subjects on his car, for very much the same
reason. Both the inert woman and the dysfunctional car are obstacles that thwart the
projects of their respective protagonists completely. Just as the car prevents Fawlty
from getting the food to the guests, the puppet cannot reenact the final hours of
Moses’ life whilst the woman is 'in his garden'. In Heideggerean terminology, both the
77 This roughly means that the body is subject to gravity (in the sense that it falls when unsupported and that it has
a centre of gravity which governs when it is ‘off balance’) and is self-propelled - it moves by exerting force upon the
surface of the table.
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woman and Fawlty’s car are obtrusive and in both cases impotent fury is the response
engendered.78
Whilst this deliberate obtrusiveness was interesting, far more exciting from my point
of view was a failure that was not a scripted part of the show. Shortly preceding the
arrival of the woman, the puppet engaged in a piece of physical comedy with an
imaginary treadmill which lead to his ear coming loose and flapping about every time
he moved his head. This was acknowledged several times by the puppet, and was
integrated rather well into the performance. When he was ranting impotently at the
woman, the flapping ear became an irritant. He declared "I've had enough of this!",
ripped off the ear and threw it away. However, he (or rather, Mark, the puppeteer) did
this with such vigour that the puppet's hand came off too. Immediately, one of the
puppeteers started corpsing. The puppet took a few moments to assess the situation
before turning to Mark and calling him a “twat”. As Mark was responsible for voicing
the puppet, he was effectively insulting himself, thus highlighting the seemingly
paradoxical nature of the puppet.
I believe that the referential structure I outlined in the previous chapter is ideally
suited to understanding this phenomenon. Let us recall what Koestler says about
incongruity, specifically that what underpins incongruity humour is ‘bisociation’ - ‘the
perceiving of a situation or idea in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible
frames of reference, M1 and M2’.(Koestler 1989:35) I want to claim that we need to
understand this moment in those terms. M1 is constituted by three puppeteers
manipulating a broadly anthropomorphic puppet - that is, they move the puppet on
the table with their hands in order to give it 'the illusion of life' as a step
towards staging a memorable theatre piece for the sake of being respected
puppeteers. M2 is a man trying impotently to remove a woman from his table - that
is, he kicks the woman on the table with his feet in order to move her as a step
towards clearing his performance area for the sake of telling the story of Moses.
When the puppet breaks - specifically, when the hand falls off - this interrupts both
M1 and M2. The puppeteers in M1 can't continue manipulating the puppet until the
78 The reader might have noted that this is the first instance in which I have used this terminology in relation to
human beings rather than objects. I will return to this issue in §5.2.1, but I am well aware that Heidegger would
probably not approve of this usage.
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issue is addressed and the puppet in M2 can't continue with his projects either - losing
a hand is rather debilitating. The performers overcome the problem adeptly by having
the puppet (M2) chastise the puppeteer (M1) and getting him to fix the problem, and
in so doing he gets a number of big laughs from the audience. Indeed, I would go as
far as to say that the main source of comedy in this piece are the moments in which
the two referential contexts meet or clash. Moreover, the performative failure of the
puppet discloses the theatricality of the context, and we become aware of both the
referential contexts and our position as audience members.
The Table is a fantastic example of a piece which knowingly plays with two referential
contexts which are nestled in together, but I want to suggest that this nestling is a
necessary structure of all puppet theatre. Insofar as you have a puppeteer animating
an object and the object has intentions and projects which are ostensibly different to
those of the animator (perhaps the defining feature of puppetry), then you have two
referential contexts which structure those projects and intentions. When the puppet
fails, such as when the puppet's hand falls off or the marionette gets tangled in its own
strings, then the failure discloses this nestled structure. Imagine I am performing a
gripping production of Hamlet in which Ophelia is played by a puppet. If my skills as
a puppeteer are up to scratch, then you will have been gripped and moved by the
performance. Now imagine that Ophelia's head suddenly falls off and you see my
hand poking out of her neck. At that moment, you are ripped away from whatever’s
rotten in the state of Denmark (M2) and confronted with a red-faced performer
struggling with a prop (M1).
So, the central claim that I want to make about the puppet theatre is that constitutive
to the 'illusion of life' often taken to be the defining characteristic of the puppet
theatre is there being at least two referential contexts nestled together. In this way,
both puppet and puppeteer can share a stage and be co-present, having projects and
intentions which ostensibly diverge and/or clash with each other. If there is only one
referential context, then the objects being manipulated by the human on stage are
understood exclusively in terms of the human's projects - the spoon is a prop, the
humanoid doll is a 'toy'. This does not preclude the object thwarting the project, as we
saw in the case of the dysfunctional object in the work of Chaplin, but it does entail
that the object cannot be understood as having projects - it cannot truly be
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humanlike. By this, I mean that only the anthropic object can have a referential
context, and therefore it can have projects and intentions of its own. Usually there are
two referential contexts co-existing together in the puppet theatre, but there is no
reason in principle why that is the maximum. In fact, I want to look at a short scene in
Nina Conti's show, Evolution, in which there are three referential contexts co-existing
on stage, a fact that underpins much of the humour in the piece. As with the previous
chapter, it is recommended that the reader watches the clip in question before
continuing.79
In this production, it is established that Nina Conti is rather prudish and she is unable
to speak frankly about sex, for example, without doing so through the Monkey
character. In order to try to get over her dependency on the Monkey, she decides to
use a puppet of her father - the actor, Tom Conti - to help. In the scene that follows,
Nina holds Tom in her arms and Tom puts his hand inside Monkey - ostensibly in an
attempt to manipulate the puppet. So, in the dramaturgy of the piece, Nina controls a
puppet (Tom) who wants to learn to control a puppet (Monkey). This is somewhat
confused by the fact that Monkey is aware that he is not real and at times seems to
rebel from both Nina and Tom. A dialogue between the three follows.
Nina: So Dad's going to try some ventriloquism
Monkey: Ok, Tom, get your hand in.
Nina: Alright, you ready?
Tom: I think so
Nina: Ok, so…ask monkey a question and then do
the answer.
Tom: Ok
Monkey: Ask away
Nina: You two sound like each other.
Tom: It's your lack of talent.
Nina: Ask him a question.
Tom: Do you like nuts?
Monkey: Oh, Jesus, he's worse than you are!
79
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 1 - ‘Nina Conti I’
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Tom: What's the matter?
Nina: Monkey's…err… he knows he's not real.
Monkey: It's kinda deconstructive.
Tom: Oh, I see.
Nina: So ask him another question.
Tom: Do you like having a hand up your jacksy?
Monkey: Yes, I love it.
Tom: Did I do that?
Nina: No, I did that.
Tom: Did she do that?
Monkey: Yes she did.
Tom: Very good.
Nina: Thank you. So ask him another question.
Tom: Do you wish you were a real monkey?
Monkey: No, not really.
Tom: Did I do that?
Nina: No, he did that.
Tom: You did that?
Monkey: No, she's fucking with you.
Nina: You do it this time and you do the voice.
Tom: How do you do the voice?
Nina: The voice is kinda like swallowing and throwing up at the same time.
Pause
Nina: Go on.
Tom: Do you like climbing trees?
Monkey makes some groany noises whilst Tom's mouth moves.
Tom: How was that?
Nina: It was not bad, but I saw your lips move.
Monkey: Me too, fucking loads.
Tom: It's too hard. Forget it, Nina.
I want to claim that the best way to understand this is in terms of three referential
contexts, each nestled in another. First (M1), there is Nina Conti, manipulating two
puppets on stage as part of a fringe comedy show. Second (M2), there is Tom Conti,
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who is trying to learn puppetry by manipulating a Monkey puppet. Third (M3), there
is Monkey, a reluctant puppet in a comedy puppet show who doesn’t allow himself to
be manipulated by either Tom or Nina. The protagonist in each referential context is
aware of the other referential contexts - when Tom attributes the similarity between
his and Monkey’s voice to Nina’s ‘lack of talent’, he acknowledges the reality of M1.
Similarly, when Monkey admits to knowing that he is not real (saying ‘it’s kinda
deconstructive’) that alludes to the reality of M1. However, the moment when Tom
ventriloquizes poorly must be situated within M2 to be intelligible. The fact that there
is so much ambiguity as to who is doing what and to whom is an indication of how
unsustainable this nestled structure is. (Perhaps that’s the reason why two referential
contexts is much more common within puppet theatre). Moreover, this instability
underpins much of the humour in the scene. I want to suggest that this is because,
like the case of failure seen in The Table, this failure discloses the referential structure
to us.
In non-comical puppet theatre there are seldom moments when the puppet character
alludes to his fictitiousness, because to do so undermines the structure and reality of
the piece. However, comic puppet theatre can draw many laughs out of doing just
that. It could perhaps be argued that this is one of the main characteristics of comedyclub ventriloquism. In fact, the puppet asking ‘what is your hand doing up my
jacksey?’ borders on cliche, but almost invariably gets a laugh nonetheless.
So, I want to claim that in order for us to invest fully into the dramaturgical reality of
the piece, we need the referential context which contains the machinations of puppet
theatre to fall into the background. When this happens, the puppeteer can be present
but not phenomenologically salient. It is perhaps worth briefly addressing how the
puppeteer achieves this before addressing the broader question of what it means for
the object to be humanlike.
5.1.1 Principles of Saliency (Or Puppetry 101)
In his doctoral thesis, Paul Piris, one of my colleagues at the Royal Central School of
Speech and Drama, draws out a phenomenological account of the practice of
‘manipulacting’. That is, the performer who both acts and puppeteers at the same
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time, maintaining a presence alongside the puppet. Piris’ thoughts on the role of the
gaze in manipulaction is one of his most important insights, and as such I believe it is
worth quotation at length.
The look of the manipulactor has several functions. The manipulactor guides the
look of the audience through the direction of his own look. For instance, by
looking at the side of the head of the puppet, the manipulator signals to the
audience that the focus of the attention is the puppet. If the manipulactor
exchanges looks with the puppet, he signals that he is also part of the action…
Five calibrations of the look exist when manipulactors and puppets interact
together:
- The puppet looks at the surroundings while the manipulactor looks at the
puppet.
- The manipulactor looks at the surroundings while the puppet looks at the
manipulactor.
- The manipulactor and the puppet exchange looks.
- The manipulactor and puppet share an object of vision by looking at the same
place in their surroundings.
- The puppet and the manipulactor do not look at the same place for reasons
inherent in their relationship. It could be that they are scared of each other, or
that they are purposely ignoring each other because of an earlier argument, or
that they are both absorbed in very specific tasks. (Piris 2011:215-6)
These are the possible permutations that Piris identifies which can create a co-present
manipulactor. It is important to state that these ‘calibrations’ aren’t fixed, and
invariably one sees several changes throughout a good piece of ‘manipulacting’.
Crucially, it should not linger on the first calibration - the puppet engaging with the
surroundings whilst the puppeteer looks at the puppet. When one does this, the
puppet becomes the predominant character and the manipulator falls into the
background, and this is precisely what happens in non-manipulacted puppetry. For
example, in their recent production, Or You Could Kiss Me, Handspring Theatre
Company’s puppeteers fall into the background fairly immediately, because their gaze
is fixed firmly on the puppets at all times. By contrast, in The Table, when the
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puppeteers look up to illustrate the importance of their focus, they suddenly become a
salient part of the scene.
This finding echoes the research that I outlined in §3.2.1 regarding Breazeal’s robot,
Kismet, and the way in which it uses gaze and protospeech in order to share a sense of
saliency of things in the environment. In §3.2.2, I went on to challenge Baron-Cohen’s
belief that we understand the other through an occult act of ‘mind-reading’, which I
believe is not only false, but overlooks the more fundamental way in which we are in
the world with others. I hope to take up this point in the next section, in which I will
look at cases of the anthropic object - those objects that are characterised by being-inthe-world.
Before I move away from the principles of puppetry, there is one other aspect which I
feel is worth addressing briefly, and that is the role of body schema in developing the
sense of the autonomy of the puppet. As Piris states, in manipulacting ‘the performer
identifies distinct parts of his body as belonging to the puppet and other parts as
belonging to the character that he acts...The ultimate role of the manipulactor is to
create a dialogue between these two parts’. (Piris 2011:56) Let us recall a central claim
that I made about the manipulated puppet in §3.2.1 and §3.2.4, specifically that it can
become embodied in much the same way as our biological limbs. The division of the
body schema might be as simple as looking in different directions or as complex as
making your hand synch with your vocalisations (as in the case of Nina Conti). If
there is only one body schema and only one set of projects, then the object will
continue to seem object-like - the scene is a person playing with an inanimate object,
rather than two characters interacting.
So, my central claim regarding puppetry is that in order for the object to seem
humanlike, there needs to be more than one referential context structuring more than
one set of projects (whether or not they clash is a dramaturgical choice)80.
Additionally, if the performer wants to be present but not salient, then it is important
that he maintains focus on the puppet. By contrast, the manipulactor needs to refrain
80 As a side point, I think this framework could also be fruitful for discussion of the position of the actor to the
character he or she is portraying. For example, when one sees Sir Ian McKellen playing Widow Twankey, there
seems to be two sets of projects - one of a widow who gives advice to Aladdin, the other of a classically trained
actor having fun - which can be played with for laughs.
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from looking exclusively at the puppet because the manipulactor and puppet need to
exchange glances with each other and share a sense of what is salient in the
environment. Moreover, the manipulactor needs to develop the ability to split his
body schema in order for us to perceive two individual characters onstage rather than
one character and his inanimate play thing. Let us look now at cases of the anthropic
object in which there isn’t a visible manipulator, for which I believe the short films of
Jan Svankmajer are fantastic case studies.
5.2 Svankmajer’s Stop-motion and the Anthropic Object
First, let us look at the film Meat Love.81 I want to argue that although the steaks do
not look like a human, they are still anthropic - that is, they are characterised by what
Heidegger calls ‘being-in-the-world’. Hopefully by now the reader will have a strong
sense of what precisely I mean by claiming this. It is ‘in the world’ insofar as it has an
understanding of the interlocking practices, equipment and skills which form the
fabric of social life, but it is more than that. Fundamentally, Dasein - and by
extension, the anthropic object - is characterised by having projects which matter to
it. These projects and intentions underpin and structure our understanding of the
practices and equipment necessary and appropriate for their successful realisation.
Using an earlier example, Basil Fawlty experiences the car as something which
thwarts his projects. However, for the most part things go smoothly and one can just
get on with the project with which one is immersed. In the last section, I claimed that
when the puppet is co-present with the person manipulating it, there are necessarily
at least two sets of referential contexts nestled in together. I do not think this happens
in the stop-motion case studies I am studying in this section, but there is still an
interesting interaction between the anthropic objects and the humans which share a
world with them.
In Meat Love, after being cut from a slab of meat, a steak stands up and looks at her
reflection in a spoon. A second piece of meat walks up to her and slaps her behind, in
response to which she drops the spoon, picks up a tea towel and wraps it around her
81
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 2 - ‘Meat Love’
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to hide her modesty. The second steak then turns the radio on and invites her to
dance. After they fumble around in some flour and begin to make love, the two steaks
are suddenly picked up by a pair of carving forks and thrown into a pan.
Now, clearly both the steaks have intentions and projects which underpin their
interaction - at the risk of sounding coy, let’s say that they are engaging in a ‘fling’.
The courtship ritual that they engage in is a staple of many romantic comedies. At
first, the male is too coarse in his advances - the slapping of a bottom is a rather crude
signifier of interest, to which the female responds with (perhaps feigned) offence and
modesty. Understanding that the lady needs to be wooed, he tries the more socially
acceptable tact - what is often called the ‘vertical expression of a horizontal desire’,82
i.e. dance. Not soon after, he gets his way. This courtship ritual underpins the use of a
towel and a radio, and this tool usage is indicative of their ‘being-in-the-world’. It is
notable that the description I have just given could be equally applicable to human
actors. In fact, aside from the superficial visual differences, it is hard to pin down
precisely why those characters are fundamentally different from you or I - after all,
aren’t we also ‘slabs of meat’? However, this difference becomes clearer in the final
moment when the fork picks them up and throws them into the pan.
I want to argue that this precise moment is characterised by an ontological shift. In
the moments preceding this, they are two Dasein engaging in the activity of seduction
and we do not relate to them as mere ‘things’ that one uses in one’s everyday activity.
(i.e they are not situated in the ‘dinner table’ referential context that I outlined in the
previous chapter). This completely changes when they are picked up and put into the
pan. The moment that they are lifted from the plate, it seems like they return to
ontological ‘objectdom’. It is important to note that they do not react to being stabbed
and thrown into a boiling hot pan in the same manner as you or I would. (I imagine
most of us would scream and flail). In short, they stop relating to each other and the
context in which they are situated. It is on this basis that I want to claim that they
cease to be anthropic the moment they leave the plate - if they did not, then the piece
would be much crueler and I suspect that far fewer people would be amused.
Whilst this phrase is often attributed to Robert Frost, I first heard it in Warren Drew’s play, The Common Good,
at the Roundhouse Theatre in 2010.
82
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However, I feel I should add two caveats. The first is regarding our sentiments specifically, I suspect most of us have a lingering empathy for the formerly anthropic
object. Although we might understand intellectually that the object is no longer ‘with
us’ - that is, anthropic - we can’t sever the empathetic attachment we have to it very
easily. This has a clear parallel in how we relate to the dead. We have very strongly
held beliefs about what one ought to do with a person’s remains even though most of
us don’t believe that the body or ashes is ‘still them’. Similarly, (although ultimately
more trivially) I’m rather reluctant to shove a puppet in a suitcase after a three hour
rehearsal in which I have seen it ‘come to life’. The second caveat warrants a longer
digression, as the issue of ethics weighs heavily on both Svankmajer’s work and the
area as a whole. Whilst I said from the outset that I don’t want to deal with the issue
of ethics in detail, I feel it is necessary to make a detour into ethics in order to address
the issues with the sensitivity that they deserve.
5.2.1 Detour into Ethics
In his book, Zero Degrees of Empathy, Simon Baron-Cohen recalls his father telling
him, aged seven, how the Nazis turned Jewish people into lampshades and soap. This
stuck with him and eventually led him to write the book, which attempts to answer
the question, ‘how can humans treat other people like objects?’ (Baron-Cohen 2011:1)
Baron-Cohen answers from a very cognitivist viewpoint - essentially, that there is a
‘circuit’ in the brain which corresponds to empathy and certain conditions can lead to
this being impaired - but I’m more interested in the question than his answer.
Underpinning his justifiable horror at the atrocities of the Nazis, there is an issue of
ontology. Treating a human as if he or she is an object is both ethically and
ontologically wrong. Our horror is down to a fundamental conviction that we ought to
treat other Dasein differently to equipment, and yet Baron-Cohen’s book is potent in
illustrating how easily this conviction can slip.
In contrast to Heidegger - who seems very ambivalent regarding the issue of ethics - it
is my belief that fundamental ontology can provide a solid grounding for certain
ethical demands. Indeed, I would personally go as far as to state that the
ontic/ontological distinction that Heidegger draws out is germane to the question of
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ethics. We might have certain ontic commitments that are a necessary condition of
certain wrongs but are culturally relative - for example, the concept of spousal
infidelity is tethered to a cultural commitment to the value of monogamy, which
might not necessarily be found in all cultures - and in this sense, some moral values
are culturally relative. However, I think there are also normative demands which arise
from ontology which are absolute - understanding the other as a fellow Dasein entails
treating the other as a Dasein. Unfortunately I do not have time to draw out and
defend my position in full, but I thought it worth being explicit in stating my view on
this matter.83
Returning to my claim regarding Meat Love, I would argue that if the steaks stayed
anthropic whilst they were being cooked, there would be ethical implications. It would
be an act of cruelty, in Baron-Cohen’s strict sense, and I would suggest that if we were
to laugh then we would be implicated in such cruelty. This is a rather trivial example,
especially when contrasted so starkly with the cases that Baron-Cohen deals with, but
I think the point is important. Laughter at such cruelty would be distinct from the sort
of laughter that Meat Love engenders.84 The latter is underpinned by an ontological
shift - from anthropic to objectlike - whereas the former is not. The boundaries
between these are rather fuzzy, and I suspect that this is the reason that the humour
of Svankmajer is rather dark.85 Nonetheless, I would like to maintain that there is
such a distinction, and for the time being focus on cases of the latter.
As a side point, there is a clear link between the plight of the steaks in the film and the
ethics of meat consumption. I personally find the argument for vegetarianism very
convincing (in fact, I am a vegetarian) but I don’t think that this thesis is the right
platform for me to make that argument.86 Not least because I have not yet sufficiently
outlined the ontological status of the animal - this ontological account will be drawn
out in the next chapter.
83 For a position antithetical to my own on the relationship between ontology and ethics, I would recommend
Levinas (1989). Obviously it falls outside of the scope of this thesis to articulate a response to that work here.
84 Laughter at cruelty is perhaps best understood in terms of the Hobbesian ‘superiority theory’. I don’t think that
such superiority laughter is as universal as the theory’s proponents often claim, and it does not help us understand
the ontological question at hand.
85 After I presented these ideas at a conference a stranger suggested afterwards that Svankmajer’s work isn’t
actually comic, with the implication being that it falls outside the scope of this thesis. I would dispute this. I think
the comedy is very dark but still present nonetheless.
86 I would recommend Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation as a compelling version of this argument.
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5.2.2 Back to Svankmajer
Let us return now to the work of Svankmajer, specifically to the short film Picnic with
Weissman. I think this an interesting contrast to Meat Love because in this film it is
the objects which are cruel to the human. Let’s look at the first clip, which I have
described below.87
A shovel gets off a peg and starts to dig a hole. The record finishes, the needle of the
gramophone lifts up then the record gets off and rolls away. A new record slides out of
its jacket, rolls out and hops on to the gramophone. The gramophone starts again.
Cards on a table flip over. We return to the shovel, which is still digging away. The
cards, now all turned over, collect themselves and slide into a draw. The clothes sit up,
pick up a prune, which travels up one arm, across the body, and then a stone is spat
out of the other arm. He has a couple more. And then finishes the rest.
Now, what I find interesting is the difference between the objects in the scene. First,
consider the shovel. I don’t think there is any question that this object has intentions
and projects of its own.88 There is a clear reason why it is digging, and it does not
allow itself to get distracted from that. Although it only occasionally relates to the
other objects explicitly (such as when the ball falls in the ditch he has dug, so he flings
it out), I think it is clear that they all share a world even though their projects diverge
a little bit. In short, I would suggest that the shovel is anthropic. By contrast, I don’t
think the prunes which the clothes consume have intentions of their own. The
movement through the clothes is more akin to digestion than deliberate travel, and
they seem to be merely pieces of food rather than agents which choose to be
consumed. Then there is the gramophone. This could well be a sophisticated
automata, as it fulfils the same function as it normally does and it doesn’t really
display any of the hallmarks of Dasein. Perhaps, unlike the record which chooses to
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 3 - ‘Picnic with Weissman I’
An alternative reading of this, suggested by my supervisor, is that the objects are animated by some
supernatural being. In situations where this is the case, I would suggest that the nestled structure outlined in §5.1
will be a useful explanatory tool. Moreover, this is definitely what is happening extra-diegetically - Svankmajer is
moving the objects between shots. However, I think diegetically the most satisfactory reading of this animation is
the one I’m pursuing here.
87
88
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hop on and be played, the record player is just a piece of equipment that the others
use to listen to music. There is one moment which seems to contradict this reading that is, when the ball lands on the gramophone’s needle, and the gramophone shakes
it off. Even if the gramophone is freely choosing to play records, it is more bound to
its equipmentality than some of the other objects. The clothes are probably the
clearest example of objects which diverge from their everyday utility - instead of
simply being worn or hanging up inert in the wardrobe, they lounge around and eat
prunes.
As such, I think it is clear that different anthropic objects can have different attitudes
toward their usual functionality. We can imagine some objects dutifully fulfilling their
function despite having a choice and others trying to fight back (successfully or
impotently). In this way, we can find an analogy between the object’s function and the
social roles live humans undertake. In one of his live shows, the comedian Peter Kay
likens a Hobnob biscuit to a marine with respect to its aptitude for dunking demonstrating a cocky arrogance and demanding to be dunked repeatedly into a mug
of tea.89 Much in the same way that the puppet can realise his puppetness and either
embrace or rebel against it, so too can the other anthropic objects regarding their
equipmentality. Perhaps the biggest rebellion that the anthropic object could
undertake would be the overthrowing of man, and this rebellion forms the climax of
Picnic with Weissman.90 At the end of this film, the gramophone stops. Everything gramophone, chess game, chaise lounge and all - are covered with autumn leaves. The
wardrobe opens and a man, bound and gagged, falls out and into the grave. The
shovel then begins to cover him in dirt.
This clearly demonstrates the triumph of the anthropic objects over the human
Dasein to which they were previously subservient, and this is a common theme in
science fiction. More often than not, when robots are depicted as going beyond being
objects that we use in our everyday activity to truly engaging in activities with us the
next step seems to be them trying to either enslave us or eradicate us completely.
Although this fact is interesting, I don’t think it is worth pursuing here. Nonetheless, I
want to look at the case of robots for two reasons - first, because unlike the objects in
89
90
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 4 - ‘Peter Kay'
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 5 - ‘Picnic with Weissman II'
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Svankmajer’s films they usually have a mastery of language. Second, because they
tend to also have another defining feature of human Dasein - an understanding of
their own finitude. In the next section, I will pick out key moments in the film Short
Circuit to elucidate the applicability of the Heideggerean framework that I am trying
to develop.
5.3 Short Circuit and the Anthropic Robot
In the 1986 film Short Circuit, a military robot leaves the compound on which he was
developed (due to confusion after being struck by lightening). After a short while, he
is discovered by Stephanie who initially thinks he is an alien. Stephanie tries to teach
Number 5 all about life on earth, allowing him to read all the books she has and then
immersing him in popular television culture. Once she discovers Number 5 is a robot,
she phones Nova Robotics (the company that developed him) and arranges for them
to pick him up. Below is a transcript of the conversation that directly follows her
discussion with Nova.91
Stephanie: Hey you! Number 5! What are you doing? You're going to scare my
animals, bozo. Listen. I've just called Nova and they are coming out to get you, they
are going to give you a tune up.
Number 5: Tune up? Input?
Stephanie: No, take you apart, find which screw's loose.
Number 5: Apart. Undone. Dismantle. Dissect. Disassemble.
Stephanie: Right…
Number Five notices a grasshopper.
Number 5: Jump!
Stephanie: Oh, look! It's a grasshopper!
Number 5: Grasshopper. Orthopterous insect. Jump!
Number 5 starts jumping like the grasshopper.
Stephanie: Alright, let's go back now… hey!
91
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 6 - ‘Short Circuit I'
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Number 5 turns to Stephanie and accidentally jump on the grasshopper
Stephanie: Dammit, you klutz! Look what you did!
Number 5: Error! Grasshopper disassemble...Reassemble.
Stephanie: Huh?
Number 5: Reassemble.
Stephanie: I can't reassemble him. You've squashed him. He's dead.
Number 5: Dead?
Stephanie: Right. Dead as a door nail.
Number 5: Reassemble Stephanie! Reassemble!
Stephanie: I know you don't understand. But when you're dead, you're dead. That's
just the way it is. Dead is forever.
Number 5: Squash - dead. Disassemble - dead. Disassemble! Dead!!!
Number 5 starts to panic and runs away.
Stephanie: Hey! Slow down!
Number 5: No disassemble!
Stephanie: Where are you going?
Number 5: Flee. Escape!
Number 5 goes into Stephanie's truck.
Stephanie: Oh my god! Hey you! Get out of my truck!
Number 5 locks the door.
Stephanie: Hey! Hey! Let me in! No! Don't!!
Number 5 reads the manual for the truck.
Stephanie: You open this door right now!
Number 5 starts the truck.
Stephanie: No! Don't start my truck! You don't know how to drive!
Number 5 drives away. Stephanie manages to climb onto the back of the truck.
I think it is clear from this short clip that Number 5 shares a world with Stephanie.
First and foremost, they have a shared sense of what is salient in the environment.
When Number 5 notices the grasshopper, Stephanie is able to follow his gaze in order
to understand what has sparked his interest. This fact is important, because it is on
this basis that she is able to name it. Recall my discussion of ostensive definitions in
§2.1.3. Even though philosophers have often thought that the ostensive definition (i.e.
pointing and naming something) is basic and fundamental, I want to claim that this is
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far from the case. When I point at something and give it a name, there is an inherent
ambiguity in that gesture. The practice of pointing is something we have to learn and
the ostensive definition is always ambiguous. If I point to a tree and accompany that
act with a word, how does the listener know if I am naming the object, its colour or
the texture of the bark? There needs to be a shared context which underpins
everyone’s understanding in order for the issue to be resolved.
Moreover, the sort of understanding that they both bring to the discussion is
interesting - Number 5 has a lot of propositional knowledge, which a computer is very
adept at processing, and Stephanie has more practical understanding. If they were not
in the world together, then I suspect that the epistemological gulf between them
would have been insurmountable. It is because they are both embodied and have
shared environment that they are able to build on each other’s understanding. As a
side note, I think Hubert Dreyfus would probably appreciate the fact that Number 5 is
actually a terrible driver, indicating that the know-how that one builds from months
behind a wheel is not reducible to a set of facts in a manual.
Although these issues are an important part of the account I am trying to build up of
what it means to be ‘in-the-world’, there is perhaps a more pressing issue that has not
yet been adequately addressed. Specifically, our understanding of our own death.
Number 5 was familiar with all the concepts surrounding death (he read the whole
Encyclopedia Britannica) yet he did not understand the gravity of it, particularly
regarding his own death. This has a clear parallel in literature, specifically Tolstoy’s
short story The Death of Ivan Illych. In this, the titular character learns that he is
dying, to which he responds with incredulity.
The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are
mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied
to Caius, but certainly not applied to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but
a creature quite, quite separate from all others. (Tolstoy 2011:70)
Recall what I said about our everyday understanding regarding death in §2.6.2.
Specifically, that according to Heidegger there are three ways in which one idly talks
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about death. First, as a mishap, allowing one to conclude that it won’t happen to me
or that I might be able to overcome it. Second, with avoidance - death will happen
eventually, but we shouldn’t worry about it. Third, in very general terms which can
allow me to avoid the specificity of my death. It seems to me that Illych’s response is a
clear case of the third, whereas Number 5’s is perhaps an example of the first. It
seems as though Number 5 thinks that his being disassembled is something that he
can survive and it is only when Stephanie states that “dead is forever” that he truly
understands the gravity of this.
Once he does understand this - that is, once he confronts his own finitude - this
provides a stimulus for both the narrative and the character’s development into a
truly anthropic being. As Mulhall writes, ‘an authentic confrontation with death
reveals Dasein as related to its own Being in such a way as to hold open the
possibility, and impose the responsibility, of living a genuinely individual and
genuinely whole life’ (Mulhall 2008b:130) I want to argue that this is eventually what
Number 5 manages to do. According to Heidegger, in an authentic confrontation with
death, Dasein becomes individuated. Before Dasein might have been ‘lost’ in the they
- taking up the projects of the crowd and just ‘doing what one does’ - but this is no
longer possible. Once I understand that ‘dead is forever’, and that no-one can die for
me, this fact rips me from the ‘they’ and my existence is an issue for me.92
Now, I’m not entirely sure that this happens to Number 5 at the point outlined above.
After all, his initial reaction is to ‘flee’ (which is often used as an example of an
inauthentic response to death). But by the end of the film, I would say that he has an
authentic grasp of his own finitude, and on the basis of that he undertakes projects
which matter to him. In contrast to the other four robots of his batch (Numbers 1 - 4),
he disobeys his own programming - refusing to undertake the project for which he
was created (i.e. killing). This point is brought out forcefully in the following dialogue
with Newton Crosby, the man who created him.
Newton: Right, one more time from the top - who is your programmer?
Number 5: Me. (Shows him circuitry).
Newton: You rewired all your switches! No wonder you're malfunctioning!
This is still a very general portrait of authenticity and being-towards death. In §6.4.1 I will develop a much richer
account which takes into account Heidegger’s concept of temporality.
92
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Newton goes to change something.
Number 5: Uh-uh. Switches are my switches. Life not malfunction. Not malfunction. I
am alive.
Newton: No you're not. You can't be. There's gotta be another explanation.
Number 5: Okay. What?
Pause.
Number 5: Sorry, time's up.
Newton: Wait a minute, I'm thinking… could be any number of mechanical
possibilities. Entrance of moisture into the system? (Number 5 shakes his head). Heat
expansion?
Number 5: Try again.
Newton: Vibration damage?
Number 5: No way, José. I'm fit as a fiddle.
Newton: Okay, then why did you ignore your programming?
Number 5: Programming says destroy. Disassemble. Make dead. Number 5 cannot.
Newton: Why?! Why cannot?
Number 5: Is wrong. Incorrect. Newton Crosby, PhD not know this?
Newton: Well of course I know it's wrong to kill. But who told you?
Number 5: I told me.
Whilst it is tempting to make parallels between the ‘programming’ of Nova and the
ideas that we inherit from ‘the they’, I feel that would probably be rather clunky and
miss the nuances of Heidegger’s view.93 Instead, I want to simply draw your attention
to the fact that Number 5 is considerably more individuated than he was in the
previous clip. Before Stephanie explained the finality of disassembling him, he was
perfectly fine with Nova taking him apart. Now, he is reluctant to let Newton even
fiddle with his circuits - they are his circuits. Even more notably, he has taken a
deliberate stance on the practice of killing and decided that it is wrong. In several
points during the film, Number 5 could have killed the antagonists but he does not.
Even in circumstances when his own survival is at stake he decides to refrain from
killing. Crucially, this imperative to not kill comes from within. Although it is not clear
how this development comes about, I think two key things are indicative. First, that
93
A more detailed treatment of normativity will take place in §6.2 - 6.4
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he does think Nova have a right to kill him; and second, he believes that he is
fundamentally the same as Stephanie, Newton and all the other human characters.
Perhaps the source of his moral conviction comes from the ‘principle of universality’ ‘If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me.’
(Chomsky 2007)
So, once Number 5 has grasped the gravity of his own death, this leads him to take a
stand on his own existence and pursue projects that matter to him. This is the
hallmark and distinguishing feature of Dasein. However, this is not the point at which
Newton Crosby is convinced. Before we move away from Short Circuit, let us look at
the short scene in which Number 5 eventually manages to persuade Crosby. I will
divide the transcript into two sections, largely for the sake of exegesis, but I would
recommend watching the whole clip in question before continuing.94 In this scene,
Number 5 has spent most of the evening talking to Newton. Stephanie gives Newton a
mug of soup, which in turn sparks an idea. Newton pours a little soup onto paper and
then folds it, making a Rorschach test.
Newton: Number 5. What do you make of this?
Number 5: Hmmm… wood pulp. Plant. Vegetable. Tomato. Water. Salt. Monosodium
glutamate.
Newton: Okay! Thank you! Now you're talking like a robot.
Number 5: And resemble…look like… butterfly. Bird. Maple leaf.
Newton: Where?
Newton looks at the paper
Newton: Holy shit!
Number 5: No shit. Where see shit?
Newton is speechless.
Although the efficacy of the Rorschach test is somewhat debated clinically,95 in this
context it is useful. Newton’s question is deliberately ambiguous. If he had asked
‘what is this?’, then the very scientific answer Number 5 gives at first would have been
correct. If he had asked, ‘what does this look like?’, then he would have clearly wanted
94
95
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 7 - ‘Short Circuit II'
See, for example, Lillenfield et al. (2001)
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a different answer. Usually one doesn’t need to be explicit in such a manner, as what
is being required is often clear from the context. If I asked you at a book club what
Dan Brown’s latest novel is like, one could justifiably claim that you misunderstood
the question if you gave a list of the dimensions, weight and type of ink used in its
production. By the same token, I think it is clear that Newton is after is a description
of what the soup blots look like. The robot can, by design, analyse the chemical
properties of the objects, so his doing so would prove nothing. The fact that Number 5
can answer the question is not only indicative of the fact that he is capable of
understanding visual representation, but that he can understand intrinsically
ambiguous questions.
The issue of ambiguity is crucial, as I would claim that not only is it a brute fact of our
language, but it is also one of its positive features. This point is made by Pinker et al.
(2008), who look at the logic of ‘indirect speech’ such as euphemism and innuendo.
Whilst I don’t think it is necessary to go into it in great detail, consider the man who
wants to get away without a speeding ticket. According to Pinker, there are three
possible actions the driver can do - overt bribe, implied bribe and no bribe. The
consequences of each action is plotted as follows.
So, in terms of pure game theory, the implied bribe is an
optimal strategy. If I don’t bribe, then I get a ticket
either way. If I bribe overtly, I go free if the officer is
dishonest but I get arrested if he’s honest. The implied
bribe has the same benefit as the overt bribe, but
considerably less cost. In fact, this cost you will incur even if you don’t attempt to
bribe, so you might as well try an implied one!
Whilst one could perhaps challenge this example on the basis of it being immoral, I
don’t think that this takes away from Pinker’s central argument. Often we want to
save face, or minimise potential for offence, so we refrain from being overt in our
bribes, threats or sexual advances. Fundamentally, this ambiguity is a feature of the
language that we share, and for the most part it is unproblematic for socially
proficient adults. Moreover, I would argue that it is only because our language is
ambiguous that we can share jokes, such as the one that Newton tells Number 5.
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Newton: Now listen close. There's a priest, a minister and a rabbi, they're out playing
golf. And they are trying to decide how much to give to charity. So the priest says,
"we'll draw a circle on the ground, throw the money way up in the air, and whatever
lands inside the circle, we'll give to charity." The minister says "No, we'll draw a circle
on the ground, throw the money way up in the air, and whatever lands outside of the
circle, that's what we'll give to charity." The rabbi says "No no no. We'll throw the
money way up in the air, and whatever God wants, he keeps!"
Long pause.
Number 5: Hmmmm. Oh, I get it!
Number 5 laughs loudly.
Stephanie: What's the matter Is he laughing?
Newton: Yeah! Yeah! And the joke wasn't even that funny, and I think I screwed up
the punchline.
Number 5: "Whatever God wants, he keeps!"
Stephanie: Well you look kinda shook up.
Newton: Yeah! It's really true! Spontaneous emotional response!
Number 5: I am alive, yes?
Newton: Yeah!
They all cheer. Newton and Stephanie embrace and then kiss.
Now, I’m not really interested in analysing the logical structure of the joke, and the
quality of the gag in question is not particularly relevant either. I think it is indicative
that this is a turning point in the narrative - when Number 5 gets the joke, Newton
Crosby is finally convinced that he is ‘alive’. What the characters mean by ‘alive’ in the
film is never really defined, but clearly they are not referring to a purely biological
function. Whether or not my pet gerbil is still alive cannot be resolved by telling it a
joke. Instead, I think what is at stake is precisely the sort of being-in-the-world which
I have been outlining in the thesis thus far. As Critchley argues, the telling of a joke
necessarily presupposes a shared world, (Critchley 2002:4) and as I have been
arguing throughout the thesis, in order to get the joke you have to ‘be there’. Put
another way, being-in-the-world is the hermeneutic condition of humour. In §1.2.1 I
looked at examples of actually existing ‘jokebots’ and argued that the main problem
with such programmes is that they are not yet in the world in the same way as you or
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I. Once they are - assuming this ever happens - I would suggest that perhaps humour
would be a good litmus paper for the roboticists success. Even if, as Crosby himself
admits, the joke isn’t that funny and one screws up the punchline, the anthropic robot
might be able to give us a pointers on how to improve our performance.
5.4 Reflections on the Anthropic Object
The chapter thus far has covered a wide range of objects - from humanoid puppet to
the stop-motion shovel and finishing with a robot from science fiction. In the first set
of case studies I looked briefly at the machinations of the puppet theatre, in the
second I looked at the object’s relationship to its equipmentality and then finally I
looked at Number 5’s relationship to his own death and humour. In all of these
examples, I argued there is clear evidence that they share a world with other Dasein whether that’s overtly, as in the case of direct communication with a human or
implicitly when relating to its own equipmentality. Before moving on from this
phenomena, I want to pick up and develop an issue which was implicit in the last
chapter, but that I decided not to draw out explicitly until now.
Recall the reaction of Basil Fawlty, who angrily chastises his car for not starting. Part
of the humour in this scene, I would suggest, is due to the asymmetry between cause
and effect. At the heart of this asymmetry is ontology - Basil’s actions are ineffectual
because the car is not anthropic. (If he chastised Herbie in such a manner, perhaps
the car would respond apologetically and resume its journey). I stated earlier that
when one treats a human like an object the effect is often horrific, and although this
doesn’t necessarily preclude laughter, this humour is often rather dark. By contrast,
what is it like when a human treats an object as if it is a human, even though it is
patently not anthropic? In order to address this question, I want to look briefly at the
film Lars and the Real Girl.
5.5 Lars and the Real Girl
In this film, Lars, the main protagonist, has a sustained delusion that a sex doll he
purchased from the internet is a human girlfriend, called Bianca. In this scene, he has
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brought Bianca over to have dinner with his brother Gus and Gus’ wife, Karen. It is
very hard to describe the awkward glances between the couple, so I would encourage
the reader to watch the clip in question before proceeding.96
Lars and Bianca are sat next to each other at the table. Lars puts a piece of carrot
into his mouth and nods contentedly. He smiles to Karen. She smiles back. Lars then
cheekily takes a bit off of Bianca's plate. Karen looks to Gus, who is awkwardly
avoiding eye contact. Lars cuts a piece of meat on Bianca's plate and then puts it
into his mouth. He looks at her and smiles sweetly.
Lars: So, you're never going to believe this. Oh, it makes me mad. Bianca's from the
tropics, she's Brazilian. (He turns to Bianca and reacts as if she corrected him) Well,
half Brazilian half Danish, that's right. And somebody stole her luggage.
Karen: Oh?
Lars: Yeah. And they stole her wheelchair.
Karen: That's terrible
Karen is clearly uncomfortable. She reaches for her water.
Lars: Yeah! (Turns to Gus) Can you believe that Gus?
Gus: Yeah, I can't believe it.
Lars: Right. (Turns to Bianca, as if she is talking) Well, it makes me angry. Anyway
(turns back to Karen) I wanted to ask you a favour. (Turns back to Bianca)
She doesn't mind. I promise. (Turns to Karen) Karen, you don't mind lending Bianca
some clothes, do you? She doesn't have any.
Karen looks at Lars, then at Gus who avoids eye contact. Lars looks at little
perturbed.
Lars: Do you?
Karen: I'm not sure we're the same type, Lars.
Lars: Well, that's okay Karen, because Bianca doesn't really care about superficial
things like that, so it's okay.
Karen looks feebly at Gus then back at Lars.
Karen: Sure.
Lars: Yeah, that's … (turns to Bianca) see, I told ya. Thanks.
96
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 8 - 'Lars and the Real Girl I'
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Lars puts another piece of carrot in his mouth.
So, in what way am I justified in saying that Bianca is not anthropic in the same way
that Number 5 is? Perhaps, you might retort, she is just rather shy? Well, aside from
the fact that it is made explicitly clear within the narrative of the film that Lars is
delusional (the doctor confirms this), we can relate the scene at the dinner table to the
referential context I outlined in the last chapter. We might say that Karen cuts the
meat at the table with a knife in order to eat it as a step towards having a good meal
for the sake of satiating her hunger. Clearly Bianca does not relate to the referential
context in this way. Although the fork is placed in her hand, she does not grip it in a
manner such that it is suited for the task of getting food to her mouth. Additionally,
whereas Lars, Gus and Karen exchange glances with each other, Bianca’s gaze never
changes, even when Lars looks straight at her and speaks. This is a fundamental
characteristic that even Breazeal’s robot Kismet manages to achieve.
There might well be a temptation to suggest that Bianca does indeed have a mind, but
that Lars is the only character who is able to communicate with it. (Perhaps she is
‘locked in’ to her body.) However, this notion is only coherent insofar as you uphold
that the mind refers to an ‘inner space’ to which we only have contingent access. I
have already addressed this view in §2.1.3, so I don’t feel it necessary to return to the
argument here. As I stated previously, ‘the idea that the word ‘mind’ refers to private
inner space is problematic, and we need to understand mental predicates as not
‘pointing inwards’ to this occult space, but rather as part of a shared discursive
practice. When we describe the chess player’s intelligence, this predicate does not
point to the ‘interior space of the mind’ (which by definition cannot be observed), but
rather describes his actions with respect to normative criteria ‘out here’.’ If I am
correct about this, then I am perfectly justified in stating that we have no reason to
apply mental predicates to Bianca, therefore Lars is clearly delusional.97
In short, I think the case of Bianca stands in stark contrast to the anthropic objects
that we have looked at throughout this chapter. Bianca ostensibly has no
97 However, if I am incorrect about this matter, then ‘the inner life’ of Bianca (including whether or not she actually
has one) is by definition unknowable and, by extension, we cannot know for sure that Lars is delusional. This
would lead us to an impasse and there would be little point in arguing against this view any further.
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understanding of the being of others, and moreover, does not relate to her own being
in the same way as you or I. There is a brilliant incongruity between the way that Lars
responds to Bianca and the way that the other characters do. Crucially, I want to
argue that what underpins this is the ontology which I have been outlining throughout
this chapter - Lars treats Bianca as if she is anthropic, but fundamentally he is
mistaken about this.
5.1.1 Bianca as an Occurrent Object
Now that it’s clear that Bianca is not an anthropic object, it is perhaps worth
considering what sort of object she is. As an anatomically correct sex doll, she was
clearly designed for a specific purpose, but it is made clear within the narrative of the
film that Lars doesn’t sleep with her - in fact, the only time they share a bed is when
she is ‘dying’. However, we might still be able to refer to the doll as ready-to-hand in
reference to the function for which Lars purchased her - that is, as an ersatz
companion. Perhaps her function is as an emotional crutch for Lars to use whilst
developing as a person, much like the ‘transitional object’ in the child development
literature.98 Whilst this is undoubtedly her role within the narrative of the film, and
perhaps clinically, I don’t think Bianca is a ‘transitional object’ in the conventional
sense. It might be helpful to contrast Lars’ relationship with Bianca to the relationship
that Margot, Lars’ love interest, has to a more traditional ‘transitional’ object - her
teddy bear.
In the following scene, after a petty work feud in which Margot hid her colleague’s
action figures she returns to her desk to find her teddy with a noose around its neck.99
Margot: You've crossed the line
Colleague: Well, you kept swiping my action figures.
Margot: I hide them. I don't hang them!
Colleague: Well, whatever Margot. You are too old for that thing anyway.
Margot: Take off the noose.
98
99
See Winnicott (2005)
See DVD Appendix 2, Clip 9 - 'Lars and the Real Girl II'
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Colleague: No.
Margot: Take it off.
Colleague: Face it Margot, the bear is dead. Burn on you.
Margot leaves. Lars notices and follows her.
Colleague: I warned her.
Cut to Margot who is now crying. Lars sits with her.
Margot: It's not just the bear. I broke up with Eric.
Lars picks up the bear and starts to remove the noose
Lars: I'm sorry to hear that.
Margot: Yeah, you know, I didn't even have a good reason. He just wasn't very
interesting.
Lars jokily performs CPR on the bear. Margot laughs.
Lars: Then why was he your boyfriend?
Margot: I get lonely.
The bear is ‘resuscitated’ and ‘sits up’.
Lars: Phew!
Margot laughs.
Although Margot objects to the teddy being hanged, she does not react to its demise in
the same way that Lars does to Bianca’s. In the former case, she feels compelled to
clarify that she is not crying over the teddy bear, implicitly acknowledging that the
bear is not alive and she doesn’t actually treat it as if it were. Both the teddy and
Margot recover quickly from the incident, and both the characters and the audience
forget about it fairly promptly. If the sex doll is a transitional object, then, it is a
pathological version of it. Whereas the teddy just falls into the background of
Margot’s daily activities, Bianca does not. Generally Bianca seems to lack the
transparency of the ready-to-hand equipment. In the scene when Lars takes the sex
doll to church people can’t help but look at it - everyone but Lars is explicitly aware of
it and it never blends into the background of the scene. For this reason, I think it is
fair to say that the Bianca doll is an occurrent object - it never ceases to be the focus of
attention, for both the audience and the local community. But ultimately what the
example of Bianca really highlights is that there is an inherent ambiguity in the
phenomena that we are addressing. Certain features, such as a humanlike face or a
cuddly demeanour, compel us to relate to objects in ‘irrational’ ways. Most of us
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developed with a childhood toy to which we were deeply attached, and many of us
continue to feel that attachment as an adult (although we might not admit it as readily
as we used to).
The film concludes with a very moving sequence in which Bianca ‘dies’. Initially, Lars
finds her ‘unconscious’ and rushes her to hospital. Eventually, when Lars is able to
live without her, he starts relating to her as an ‘inanimate’ body and pronounces her
dead. In contrast to the relationship that Number 5 has to his own death, or Tolstoy’s
Ivan Illych has to his, Bianca never relates to her own finitude and we only
understand the loss in terms of the grief of Lars and the rest of the community. More
than anything, the final sequence - in which not just Lars but most of the community
mourns Bianca - highlights how deeply attached to objects we can get, even if they are
not anthropic. Although we might laugh at how Mr. Bean relates to his inanimate
teddy as if it were an anthropic friend, we might also be moved by his horror and grief
if something terrible happened to it.
5.6 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have looked at a number of anthropic objects and one example of
an inanimate object that someone relates to ‘incorrectly’. It is quite possible that the
division between the two is not as clear cut as it might have initially seemed.
Ultimately, Nina Conti’s relationship to her puppets is not too dissimilar to that of
Lars’ to Bianca, with perhaps the main difference being that she acknowledges the
fictitiousness dramaturgically.
One of the central premises of this chapter is that I have maintained an agnosticism
regarding whether or not the objects I have looked at are anthropic ‘in real life’. The
simple answer would be, of course, that they are not. Indeed, Conti’s work plays with
this fact to great effect. Nonetheless I would maintain that, with the exception of
Bianca, if they were to exist ‘in real life’ each of the objects I have described would be
as much an example of Dasein as the humans with which they interact. This is the
true essence of the anthropic object, and there are many features which are
constitutive of this. First, the anthropic object has an understanding of being including the being of other entities and Dasein, as well as its own being. Second, on
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the basis of this, it is able to share our language. Finally, it has a relationship to its
own finitude, regardless of whether or not that is an authentic one.
As we have seen, when an object makes the transition from inanimate to anthropic
the effect is often amusing. We also like it when humans treat inanimate objects as if
they were anthropic. Perhaps most fascinating of all, the anthropic object - because it
is a being in the world - can potentially get the joke as well. In the next chapter, I will
turn my attention to the question of the anthropic animal. In doing so, I will develop a
deeper account of certain aspects of being-in-the-world, such as temporality, finitude
and authenticity, which will become increasingly important as we progress towards
the existential analytic of the final chapter.
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6. A Phenomenology of Animals
In this chapter, I will address the issue of the anthropic animal. My central claim
regarding the anthropic animal is that, much like the anthropic object and the
humans that usually merit the title Dasein, it is fundamentally a being-in-the-world.
Rather than establishing this by going over the well-trodden ground of the previous
chapter, I will attempt to deepen my account of being-in-the-world. In doing so, I will
hopefully be able to tie up some loose ends remaining from the previous chapters and
lay solid foundations for the final chapter, which will involve more existential
considerations.
The loose ends in question (which may or may not have distracted the reader) are the
issues of mind, self and authenticity. Although previously, in §2.1.2 - 2.1.4 and §3.2.2,
I formulated a negative definition of ‘mind’ - that is, I tried to make it explicit that I do
not think that mental predicates point ‘inwards’ - I have not adequately answered the
question of how precisely we understand the intelligent actions of another Dasein. I
will argue that for the most part we ‘let the world do the work’100 and the reason why I
haven’t made this argument sooner is that a rich account of the world is necessary for
us to understand how it can do almost all the work that ‘theory of mind’ is usually
invoked to explain.101 Similarly, I will argue that the self is socially constructed and
that authenticity ought to be understood in those terms.
These arguments will be structured around a number of examples of anthropic
animals, primarily Brian Griffin from the animated comedy Family Guy. Although
many of these points could have been exemplified using anthropic objects or humans,
(all of which, ultimately, have the same ontological character - they are Dasein) the
purpose of treating the subject of animality separately is threefold: First, I believe it is
important to distinguish Dasein’s understanding of world from that of (non100 This is title of one of the chapters in Matthew Ratcliffe’s book Rethinking Commonsense Psychology. It is
perhaps the most convincing contemporary attempt to understand interpersonal interaction that I have
encountered, and one that has had a marked influence on my thinking.
101 In my view, ‘the objective’ standpoint which is usually characteristic of science is constitutively incapable of
accounting for the fundamental way in which we understand each other. The ontological and epistemological
assumptions of naturalism lead it to deworld the very phenomenon that it is attempting to explain and this fact has
lead scientists to invent innate faculties such as ToM modules which are simply not necessary and, moreover, don’t
actually explain anything.
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anthropic) animals. Second, I will argue that the anthropic animal has unique comic
potential - specifically, it can ‘collapse’ back into animality with a more benignly
comic effect than the human becoming animal tends to engender. Third, I will argue
that Critchley is broadly correct in suggesting that the human-becoming-animal is
usually disgusting, but I will argue that this disgust is often analogous to disgust of the
ill body, using Cronenberg’s The Fly to exemplify this point.
Before any of that, I feel it is necessary to draw out an account of the animal, which
Heidegger argues is characterised by worldhood poverty. In the next section I will
explain what precisely Heidegger means by this.
6.1 Animality and Worldhood Poverty
Let us turn to what Heidegger says about the animal - specifically, in this passage, the
domesticated one.
They belong to the house, i.e., they serve it in a certain sense. Yet they do not
belong to the house in the way in which the roof belongs to the house as
protection against storms. We keep domestic pets in the house with us, they ‘live’
with us. But we do not live with them if living means: being in an animal kind of
way. Yet we are with them nonetheless. But this being-with is not an existingwith because a dog does not exist but merely lives. Through this being with
animals we enable them to move within our world. We say that the dog is lying
underneath the table or running up the stairs and so on. Yet when we consider
the dog itself - does it comport itself toward the table as table, towards the stairs
as stairs? All the same, it does go up the stairs with us. It feeds with us - and yet,
we do not really ‘feed’. It eats with us - and yet it does not really ‘eat’. (Heidegger
1995:210)
This is an incredibly dense passage that encapsulates a substantial amount of
Heidegger’s thought. I agree with him on each point - the non-anthropic animal is
simply not in the world in the sense that we are; it does not have the same
understanding of objects (including the equipment of eating) as we do, it is not
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subject to the same normativity that we are and it does not have an understanding of
its own existence. As such it is incapable of existing either authentically or
inauthentically. But crucially, unlike the chair and stone, the animal is alive - it just
does not exist in the same sense that Dasein does. At the heart of the passage above
are a series of dichotomies that I feel are worth exploring with concrete examples.
Those dichotomies are, in the order that I will be addressing them, feeding/eating,
living with/being with and living/existing.
6.2 Feeding and Eating
What precisely is the difference between feeding and eating? Hopefully it will be clear
that the answer lies in the terrain covered in §4.1 in which I looked at the referential
context surrounding eating a meal. I claimed that, ‘I pick up the brussel sprout at the
dinner table with a fork in order to eat it as a step towards having a nice meal
for the sake of satiating my hunger.’ I want to suggest that this structure is
constitutive of the practice of eating. When Heidegger says that the dog does not
really ‘eat’, what he means is that it does not participate in the interlocking practices,
equipment and skills that define that activity.
However, there is a point that is necessary to address before we continue - specifically
the nature of the ‘for the sake of’. Strictly speaking, satiating my hunger is not a ‘for
the sake of’ in the Heideggerean sense, and my using it in previous chapters was a
necessary fudge to avoid a lengthy digression. At the time it served the purpose, but
now it is time to tug at that loose thread.
Heidegger's uses the term "the for-the-sake-of-which" to call attention to the
way human activity makes long-term sense, thus avoiding any intimation of a
final goal. A for-the-sake-of-which, like being a father or being a professor, is
not to be thought of as a goal I have in mind and can achieve. Indeed, it is not a
goal at all, but rather a self-interpretation that informs and orders all my
activities. (Dreyfus 1997:95)
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Clearly satiating my hunger cannot be a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ in this sense. But I
would maintain that there are certain self-interpretations that would directly inform
and order the practice of eating. Consider the person who sneers at the idea of eating
with one’s hands, even in contexts when it is appropriate such as eating a hotdog at
the fair. Or, perhaps a more usual example, we might think of a person who refuses to
speak with their mouth full. Such people might consider themselves to be persons of
‘good breeding’, a self-interpretation that would inform how they sit at the table, what
utensils they use, how they use them, with whom they eat and when. Different
cultures have different ways of displaying one’s class and status, and many comedies
play on the possibilities that this opens up for faux pas at the dinner table.102
Moreover, the possibilities that this opens up for transgression is incredibly fruitful
for the artist - Alfred Jarry famously ‘inverted’ the practice of eating at a restaurant
(moving from dessert to starter, rather than the other way round), and the clown Dr.
Brown revels in playing with food - he seems to do almost everything with it except
‘what one ought to do with food’. The dog cannot transgress in the same manner
because the dog feeding is not subject to the same normativity - generally I have
found dogs to be rather agnostic as to whether the food is in a bowl, on the floor or in
the hands of a stranger. It is not really clear to me what precisely would constitute a
dog feeding ‘incorrectly’ - although, of course, there are a number of things that we
humans would rather the dog refrained from feeding on. (Two examples that spring to
mind are my sofa and its own vomit).
It is only for Dasein that where, when, what, how and with whom one eats is informed
by ones self-interpretation and this is a fundamental component of the activity.103
When Heidegger claims that the dog does not really ‘eat’, this is precisely what he is
referring to. Only the anthropic animal has ‘for-the-sake-of-whichs’. This fact is
illustrated in following excerpt from Series 9 Episode 8 of Family Guy, in which Brian
Griffin - an anthropic dog - is dining in a fancy restaurant after a long day publicising
his best-selling self-help book.104
Fawlty Towers and Keeping Up Appearances are two British sitcoms that immediately come to mind.
The temporal aspect of our practices will be addressed a little later.
104 See DVD Appendix 3, Clip 1 - ‘Family Guy I’
102
103
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Brian - God, you know, Stewie, I used to think that John Lennon was a kind of a jerk
for saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. But now, I'm not saying that I am, but I
get it.
Stewie - Now that we have a few minutes to let the dust settle, I just wanna say that
I'm really proud of you.
Brian - Hey, I'm proud of myself, man. I think, like, I think everyone has greatness in
them but really it's about having the courage to kinda get inside your own head and
kinda poke around in there, you know, and be like, "Hey! Oh my gosh! What's under
here? what do you call yourself? Oh! Wisdom. Oh! Profundity. Oh! Truth. Hey, let's all
go hang out together between the covers of a book."
Stewie - I love hearing about your process.
They get down from the table.
Brian - Hey, enough about me. This was a great meal.
Stewie - Oh, good, good. I'm glad you like it, they told me everybody comes here.
As they go to leave, Brian notices Renee Zellweger.
Brian - Hey, there's Renee Zellweger. Hey Renee, how you doin'!
Renee - Oh, hi Brian.
She notices an ant crawl on the floor and eats it like an ant-eater. Brian and Stewie
walk out.
Stewie - She seemed really nice.
Brian - (angry) Get over here.
Stewie - Is everything okay?
Brian - No, everything is not okay. Can you figure out what the problem is?
Stewie - I… er…I don't think…oh god.
Brian - How do you think I feel walking out of the back room of the restaurant and
seeing Renee Zellweger eating at the front room of the restaurant? I am mortified. I
am absolutely mortified, you should know better than this!
Stewie - I told them who you were when I made the reservation…
Brian - Look, I have written a best-selling phenomenon. I should be sitting in the
front damn room!
Hopefully it should be clear how Brian’s self-interpretation informs where, what and
how he eats. It is perfectly conceivable that he would similarly chastise Stewie for
taking him to a less esteemed establishment where one is expected to eat chicken
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from a bucket with one’s hands.105 Although the idea of there being an 'alpha male'
amongst certain animal groups is fairly established, I would suggest that the privilege
that comes with this pales in comparison to the special treatment that surrounds
being a celebrated film star, author or the Pope. Our society is deeply hierarchical,
and with this hierarchy comes different levels of normativity - what is acceptable in
McDonalds is markedly different to what is acceptable in the Ritz. The comic moment
when Renee Zellweger eats the ant is a brilliant reversal of this - her animality is
deeply incongruous within this setting.
There is also the question of when one eats that I think is important to draw out.
Humans are remarkable in their ability to delay gratification, and although there is
some variation in this ability within the population106 it is something that we all do. I
recently went to a wedding reception at which there was a huge, delicious cake
looming large over a room full of hungry guests who were waiting for the couple to
arrive. Obviously none of us tucked in before the couple had made the first cut, but
this seemingly unremarkable fact is indicative - we all felt a sense of tacit prohibition
that was never overtly declared or enforced. It is hard to imagine a room of 100
hungry dogs displaying the same willpower, and the issue is not just that they are
unprepared to 'tow the line' with regard to this normativity - it simply does not exert
any notable force upon them.
6.3 Living with and Being With
So, fundamental to our ‘being with’ others is that those others impose certain
normative constraints upon us, to which we can either conform like Stewie or
transgress like Jarry. In simply knowing ‘what one ought to do’ at the dinner table or
with a pair of scissors, the anthropic dog is subject to a level of normativity that does
not trouble his non-anthropic canine brethren. This lies at the heart of the distinction
between being with and living with - the being-with characteristic of Dasein entails
that ones practices and use of equipment is subject to normative criteria that ‘they’
E.g. Kentucky Fried Chicken
Some psychologists have suggested a link between this ability in children and future success in careers, but that
is rather tangential to my point.
105
106
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determine. Living with, by contrast, does not. We saw that this normativity pervades
the practice of eating, but it also pervades other bodily functions that we share with all
mammals. Just as we have a remarkable ability to refrain from ingesting food at
inappropriate times, most socially proficient adults are similarly able to refrain from
defecation. As with eating, there are equipment, practices, skills and norms governing
this very basic necessity. Transgressions of these norms are not treated lightly by
society, but nobody really expects animals to conform to them. The fact that dogowners are instructed by law to ‘clean up after’ their pet suggests it is taken as a given
that attempts to train them to ‘hold it’ are futile, and the responsible owner will
instead adjust his routine to accommodate that fact.
On the official YouTube channel of Crufts, there is a video entitled ‘HILARIOUS - Dog
Takes a Dump on TV’107 which received over 1,500,000 views and nearly 4000 ‘likes’
in a little over a month. So even if the reader is unamused by such things, it must be
noted that the video appeals to more than the Kennel Club clique. In the video, a dog
is disqualified from the agility competition because it defecates in the middle of the
course. In this way, it shows a deep disregard to the context and norms surrounding
the competition. 108 It seems unlikely that the dog really understood what it was
doing, so it does not appear to be a wilful act of defiance. Consider what it would be
like, by contrast, if a contestant defecated in the middle of the stage in a Miss World
or Mr. Universe contest. The commentator on the dog show video explains that ‘a
dog’s got to do what a dog’s got to do’, but that probably wouldn’t be a sufficient
explanation in the case of the human competitors. The contestant having irritable
bowel syndrome might well suffice, or perhaps the contestant was making a deliberate
‘dirty protest’ against the objectification that is endemic in such competitions. In
short, for an anthropic animal or human there are two sorts of explanation that would
normally satisfy - either a bodily failure or a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’. The former will
be addressed in the next chapter, so let us look at the latter, which again I want to
See DVD Appendix 3, Clip 2 - ‘Youtube Clip’
In his book, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Nicholas Ridout draws out an interesting
account of the non-anthropic animal onstage, which is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. Fundamental
to his account is the idea that ‘by sharing the stage with us, the non-human animal is co-opted into patterns of
intention’ (Ridout 2006:102). I agree with him on this point, but I suspect I diverge from his view with my belief
that this is best understood within a framework of the ‘referential structure’ outlined by Heidegger.
107
108
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exemplify using a scene from Family Guy. In this scene, Brian is reluctantly
competing in a dog show in order to win some prize money for the Griffin family.109
Announcer - Next, Peter Griffin and his dog, Brain. [sic]
Brian - Well, we're off to a good start.
The referee signals. Brian leaps over the beam, runs through a tunnel and over a see
saw. He pauses to get a cigarette out, lights it and smokes it before throwing it on to
the ground. Then he continues on the course- over the bridge, jumping over three
beams and then through a tire.
Announcer - A beautiful performance from Brain Griffin. [sic]
Meg and Lois - Go Brian!
Chris - Yay! Brain! [sic]
Peter - Alright Brian, we've got it all sewn up.
Peter places a treat on Brian's nose. Brian looks incredulous.
Brian - What…what...what the hell is this?
Peter - Oh, this? Well this is the part where you…er… you beg for a treat.
Brian - Oh, I don't think so.
Brian takes it off his nose.
Peter - Brian, you're embarrassing me.
Lois - God, he can't expect Brian to do that.
Chris- It's easier than it looks, Mom.
Peter - Come on, Brian, we had a deal
Brian - Well the deal's off. Me and the little shred of dignity I have left will be waiting
in the car.
Peter - Hey Brian, come. Don't you walk out on me. Err… (Trying to fool the judges
that this was part of the act) I now command you to leave. Yep, keep going. That's
right, flip me off. Good boy.
Hopefully it is clear that Brian’s disobedience is the result of a conviction that dog
shows are demeaning, and his ‘shred of dignity’ means that he is unprepared to beg
for food. Whilst in the last clip he was probably being unreasonable, in this one I have
a lot of sympathy for his position. To ask another Dasein to beg is clearly degrading,
109
See DVD Appendix 3, Clip 3 - ‘Family Guy II’
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and Brian’s ‘self-interpretation’ as someone who deserves to be treated with respect
prevents him from going along with Peter’s request. The issue is not whether this selfinterpretation is reasonable or justified - as we saw in the restaurant, it does not have
to be - but rather the issue is how this self-interpretation informs and orders one’s
activities. It is important to state that one’s self-interpretations do not develop ex
nihilo, but rather they are adopted and adapted from existing practices and norms in
society. Moreover, the norms of society have both positive and negative aspects, and
in the next section I will address the question of the positive aspect.
6.3.1 ‘Positive’ Normativity
As we have seen, Brian’s self-interpretation governs where he eats - in fancy
restaurants, preferably in the front - and entails that he is unprepared to beg for food.
The normativity surrounding when, where, what and how we eat is constitutive of the
practice and has implications for how we relate to one another. There is a scene in
S05 E11 of Family Guy in which Stewie is having dinner with Martin Landau and
during their conversation Landau’s chewed food repeatedly flies in Stewie’s face - a
comic reminder of why one shouldn’t speak with one’s mouth full.110 In every culture,
there are expectations about ‘what one ought to do’ and this is at the heart of
Heidegger’s discussion of ‘Das Man’ (translated as either ‘the they’ or ‘the one’).
However, we need to avoid the temptation of thinking that ‘the one’ is purely
restrictive and negative, as it is only because our practices are normative that they are
intelligible.
The functioning of the referential whole [requires that] everyone must (at least
most of the time) eat the normal way. If some ate with forks, others with
chopsticks, and still others used their right hands, the way food was cut up, and
whether one got a washcloth with dinner, whether there was bread or rice, plates
or bowls, etc. would be undecided and the whole equipmental nexus involved in
cooking and eating a meal could not exist. For eating equipment to work, how
one eats, when one eats, where one eats, what one eats, and what one eats with
110 Although it is not something that I am pursuing here, I think Stewie’s status as an anthropic baby is
interestingly rather ambiguous. Some of the characters seem to understand his speech, such as Brian, and to
others it seems like baby babbling. This is used to comic effect in a number of episodes.
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must be already determined. Thus the very functioning of equipment is
dependent upon social norms. (Dreyfus 1997:154)
This idea is most clearly seen in the example of our linguistic practices, which both
Heidegger and Wittgenstein seem to suggest are contingently normative, but despite
this the normativity is necessary. By this, I mean that the pronunciation of a specific
sentence or word is a historical contingency - it could easily have been otherwise - and
there is room for some variation. It doesn’t matter how you pronounce ‘tomato’ as
long as your interlocutor understands you. However, there needs to be some
normativity in order for the practice to be meaningful. If everyone used the word
beetle to mean something different, or indeed, pronounced it radically differently,
then it would cease to be intelligible at all. Let us turn now to another clip from
Family Guy. In this scene, Brian is frustrated with Stewie’s peculiar pronunciation of
‘Cool Whip’.111
Stewie - Ooh, you’ve got some pie, eh? Can I have a piece?
Brian - Errr...sure.
He passes the plate to Stewie
Stewie - Ooh, let me have some of that Cool wHip. (Placing emphasis on the ‘h’)
Brian - What d’you say?
Stewie - You can’t have a pie without Cool wHip.
Brian - Cool wHip?
Stewie - Cool wHip, yeah.
Brian - You mean Cool Whip?
Stewie - Yeah, Cool wHip.
Brian - Cool Whip.
Stewie - Cool wHip.
Brian - Cool Whip.
Stewie - Cool wHip.
Brian - You’re saying it weird. Why are you putting so much emphasis on the ‘h’?
Stewie - What are you talking about? I’m just saying it - Cool wHip. You put Cool
wHip on pie. Pie tastes better with Cool wHip.
111
See DVD Appendix 3, Clip 4 - ‘Family Guy III’
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Brian - Say Whip.
Stewie - Whip.
Brian - Now say Cool Whip.
Stewie - Cool wHip.
Brian - Cool Whip.
Stewie - Cool wHip.
Brian - Cool Whip.
Stewie - Cool wHip.
Brian - You’re eating hair!
Stewie spits out.
In what sense is Brian right to chastise Stewie’s pronunciation?112 Perhaps that is not
the usual way to pronounce ‘whip’, but there are a number of words for which we
permit variation - for example, bath and scone. In the UK, there seems to be regional
variation on the pronunciation of those words, but it’s not clear to me on what basis
you would deem a particular one to be ‘correct’. Historically, the aristocracy were
considered to be the measure of good pronunciation but that has obvious class-loaded
motives that make me uncomfortable. The crux of my interest is not the issue of
whether Stewie is wrong, but what allows Brian to make that charge. In order for
Brian to be in a position to challenge Stewie’s pronunciation, they need to be playing
the same ‘language game’. Recall the point I made about the ‘ostensive definition’ in
chapter 2 - my use of a word is only meaningful by virtue of the role it plays in a
shared cultural practice. The criteria against which my usage or pronunciation is
assessed are out here in the world.
This might seem obvious but it is worth making this explicit because it runs counter to
the more ‘conventional’ view of language as a sort of externalisation of something
essentially inner (i.e. thought). As Dreyfus puts it, ‘meaning is grounded neither in
some mental reality nor in arbitrary decision but is based upon a form of life in which
we necessarily dwell.’ (Dreyfus 1997:201) Crucially, Heidegger explicitly denies that
we use language as a means to externalize something intrinsically ‘inner’.
112 More generally, there is a strange play of status throughout the scenes between Brian and Stewie. At some
points Brian acts as a guardian or caregiver – often babysitting, for example. However, at other points it is made
clear that Brian is a pet, and as such his life is considered less valuable than that of the human characters, both
within the family and in society more generally.
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In talking, Dasein expresses itself not because it has, in the first instance, been
encapsulated as something ‘internal’ over against something outside, but
because as Being-in-the-world it is already ‘outside’ when it understands. What
is expressed is precisely this ‘Being-outside’. (Heidegger 1996:205)
Heidegger’s point is that language makes explicit something that was already shared.
In fact, I would argue that language can only do this. As Wittgenstein’s private
language argument indicates, if there is something intrinsically inner then there is no
meaningful way to refer to it. This is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box
argument - the word beetle doesn’t point ‘in there’, as there are no criteria against
which we could differentiate correct from incorrect usage. The normativity that
pervades everyday speech is precisely what fixes the meaning. My suggestion in
§2.1.2 was that mental predicates refer to the skill with which certain actions are
performed. When we describe someone as witty, smart, cunning etc., the referent and everything we usually need to understand it - is out here in the world. In the next
section I will attempt to further elucidate what I mean by claiming this.
6.3.2 Understanding Others and Letting the World Do the Work
I observe another Dasein, such as Brian from Family Guy, perform a simple task and
I understand what he is doing and why he is doing it. But how? This seems like a
simple question, but it has proved deeply troubling for much of the intellectual
tradition. Psychologists such as Baron-Cohen have posited that in order for me to
understand the other, I need to develop a ‘theory of mind’. I criticised this view in
§3.2.2, but I didn’t go very far in developing a positive account of this ability. In this
section I will attempt to do just that.113
113 Again, the core argument in this section can be made about all varieties of Dasein, and could have been made in
the previous chapter regarding the anthropic object. However, I think this has important implications for nonanthropic animals. Often we feel inclined to describe animal behaviour using the same mental predicates that we
use for Dasein. If my view is correct, then this invariably smuggles too much of Dasein’s understanding into it - if
mental predicates are made possible on the basis of our sharing a world, then they cannot rightly be applied to
creatures that do not share our world. At best, the use of such predicates in reference to animals should be
understood metaphorically - much like ‘the brain is a computer’, it is useful for explanation and the best metaphor
we have, but it will lead us to irresolvable problems if we take it too literally.
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The first thing that it should be noted is that, for the most part, I don’t take a detached
theoretical stance. Rather, I appreciate the distinctive character of other Dasein
through a specific sort of concern that ‘involves receptiveness to the fact that [they
are]...a locus of projects.’ (Ratcliffe 2007:72) This concern, what Heidegger calls
solicitude, is a thoroughly practical affair - the other is encountered in terms of our
projects within the world, and our ‘expectations’ of them are largely based on the
shared public norms outlined earlier.
As one co-ordinates one’s activities with others, one need not attribute
intentional states but can instead work on the implicit assumption that they will
do ‘what people are supposed to do’ in that kind of environment. The
assumption that they inhabit the same world of interrelated equipment and
routines is sufficient to anticipate the majority of behaviours in situations where
routines are there for all to follow. Simultaneously attributing beliefs and desires
to several hundred people would require considerable cognitive effort with little
reward. (Ratcliffe 2007:91)
It is only when someone is doing something extraordinary that this is insufficient. If
my friend Ollie was to take off his clothes and jump onto a wedding cake, then we
might need to ponder upon his actions and perhaps call a psychiatrist. (Unless, like
Alfred Jarry, he is a transgressive artist - in which case you might simply say, ‘oh, he’s
being arty’ and resume your meal.) Similarly, I want to suggest that my understanding
the actions of a character onstage very seldom requires that I ponder upon his mental
states - unless the performance is truly dire, I simply understand that character as a
locus of projects in light of the referential totality surrounding his activity. We should
not make the mistake of thinking that pondering upon his belief states (known in the
philosophical literature as folk psychology) is the fundamental activity underpinning
our everyday interpersonal relationships. In fact, as Ratcliffe argues, ‘participation in
the social world is the prerequisite for the development of [Folk Psychology]’
(Ratcliffe 2007:101) - we can only develop this special faculty to deal with the
exceptional cases once we are in the world.114 The implications of this view, then, are
114 This special ‘folk psychological’ faculty that we use in exceptional cases is, in my view, narrativistic. As Daniel
Hutto suggests, we situate the person within an explicit linguistic narrative in order to clarify why they are doing
what they are doing.
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that the normativity surrounding everyday activities and social roles are necessary for
interpersonal understanding. We make ourselves readable to each other by
conforming to shared conventions. Once again, I feel I should be explicit in my view
that this isn’t a case of making the ‘inner’ more readable, but rather making more
explicit what is already shared (i.e. our projects).
So, it is only on the basis of the shared practices that one inherits that one can develop
self-interpretations that permit one to differentiate oneself from others. The
sharedness that underpins our different ‘for-the-sake-of-whichs’ root them and
provide a basis for commensurability. Picking up a theme developed earlier, shortly
after the scene at the dog show, Brian Griffin engages in a civil rights battle to ensure
that animals are treated equally to human beings. In the excerpt that follows, Brian
appeals to the court that previously ruled that he should be put down for being
‘dangerous’.115
Brian walks into courthouse in suit.
Felicia - Oh, good luck, sweetness.
Brian - Thanks, Felicia.
Chairman - This meeting was called to review the judgement of the city of Quahog
versus Brian Griffin.
Brian - Justice. For all or for some? Does a dog not feel? If you scratch him, does his
leg not shake? Yes, he is man's best friend. But what manner of friend is man? I would
like to cite if I may the case of Plessy versus Ferguson…
Chairman - Wait a minute, why are we listening to a dog? Take him away!
Brian is taken by the collar.
Brian - Wait, does every dog not have his day?
Peter - Wait! Please, please! I gotta say something. All Brian's ever wanted was the
same respect he gives us. Well, that and snosages he's mental for those snosages…and
er… sure, sometimes we have arguments…like when we're in bed and Lois is in the
udenay but Brian won't amscray.
Lois - Peter…
115
See DVD Appendix 3, Clip 5 - ‘Family Guy IV’
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Peter - Okay, okay, okay. Look - the point is that he's a member of our family first and
a dog second. And I'm real sorry I forgot that, buddy. Sometimes we all need a second
chance. Sometimes we all need to forgive!
Chris - (crying) I stole ten dollars from Meg's room
Meg - (crying) I stole ten dollars from mom's purse.
Lois - (crying) I've been making counterfeit ten dollar bills for years.
Chairman - Mr. Griffin, this dog is a danger to society - albeit an articulate and
charismatic one - but the law is the law and it cannot be circumvented by pretty
words.
Peter - I'll give you each twenty bucks.
Chairman - Deal, he can go.
This scene, and the events leading up to it, draws clear parallels between Brian’s
experience as an anthropic dog and the African-American civil rights movement.
Brian is expelled from a shop and a restaurant because he is a dog and this parallel
was made explicit in his attempt to cite the landmark case of Plessy v Ferguson.
Although ultimately the case is decided by Peter’s bribe rather than Brian’s defence,
the fact that he mounted such a defence was guided and informed by his selfinterpretation as a Dasein that deserves the same respect as any other Dasein. This
self-interpretation is possible only on the basis of there always already being a world
with pre-existing roles and norms, and ‘changing the world’ requires one’s activity to
be rooted within them. As Dreyfus puts it, this always takes place on a background of
‘accepted for-the-sake-of-whichs that cannot all be questioned at once because
they...must remain in the background to lend intelligibility to criticism and change.’
(Dreyfus 1997:161)
Ultimately, according to Heidegger the for-the-sake-of-whichs that we take up from
society are at the heart of achieving an authentic existence. Authenticity (if it is
possible) requires an ownership and modification of the preexisting meanings and
values from the world into which one is thrown. Unfortunately, according to
Heidegger, we usually fall into Das Man - just doing what one does, without said
ownership and modification. In the next section I will interrogate these ideas,
specifically outlining the different debates within the literature about what precisely
Heidegger means by authenticity.
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6.4 Living vs Existing (Or: The Possibility of Authenticity)
As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, only Dasein is capable of existing,
either authentically or inauthentically. The anthropic animal, as a Dasein, has an
understanding of its own being that non-anthropic animals do not have. There are
two divergent accounts of what Heidegger means by authenticity within the literature,
and I will argue that both accounts, and the tensions between them, are potentially
fruitful for my inquiry. Fisher provides a concise overview of the two positions in the
following quotation.
The first correlates Heidegger’s talk of authentic historicality with that of selfauthorship. To the alternative perspective, however, Heidegger’s talk of Dasein’s
existentiality, with its emphasis on nullity and unattainability, is taken as
evidence that Dasein is structurally and ontologically incapable of being
completed via any life-project. (Fisher 2010a:241)
The former position, a broadly narrativistic one, was briefly outlined in the previous
chapter and as such I think it would be best to develop the opposing view before
trying to bring them into dialogue with each other.
Perhaps the most famous proponent of the ‘alternative perspective’ is Hubert Dreyfus.
Dreyfus is explicit in the fact that the shared practices in which we all are immersed
are the source of intelligibility. Fundamentally, I understand what chairs are because I
am familiar with what one does with them and there is nothing outside of our
everyday practices to fix and determine their meaning. However, this is something
that tends to get forgotten or ‘covered up’ by us - our way of doing things seems to be
right and intrinsically sensical.
Our way seems to make intrinsic sense - a sense not captured in saying, ‘This is
what we in the west happen to do’. What gets covered up in the everyday
understanding is not some deep intelligibility, as the tradition always held; it is
that the ultimate ‘ground’ of intelligibility is simply shared practices. There is no
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right interpretation. Average intelligibility is not inferior intelligibility; it simply
obscures its own groundlessness. (Dreyfus 1997:157)
So, the problem with average everydayness is that it gives us a sense that there is
fixed, intrinsic meaning. For this reason, the feeling of anxiety is crucial because it
reveals this fact to us. In anxiety, we become acutely aware that meaning is dependent
on this tissue of public significance, and feel the groundlessness that this implies.
Dreyfus draws a parallel between the world experienced in anxiety and the broken
tool, claiming that ‘unlike ordinary equipmental breakdown, anxiety is a total
disturbance. Rather than revealing some part of the workshop world from the inside,
it reveals the whole world as if from the outside. It reveals the groundlessness of the
world and of Dasein’s being-in-the world.’ (Dreyfus 1997:179)
In the previous chapter, we saw Number 5 gain an understanding of his own finitude,
and as a result achieve ‘narrativistic’ authenticity, but there is no reason in principle
that he could not have responded in a more Dreyfusian manner.116 To exemplify this
outlook, I want to turn to an anthropic animal that, upon learning about the nature of
death, wrestles with the very anxiety that Dreyfus is addressing. In this clip from the
mock-news channel The Onion, scientists have taught a gorilla that it is going to die.117
Presenter - Scientists at Tulane University's Primate Research Centre announced they
have taught a gorilla that someday it will die. Nate Meredith has more in The Lab
Report.
Nate - Thanks, Dan. In a historic first, a team of primatologists have succeeded in
teaching Quigley, a western lowland gorilla the concept of mortality and his inevitable
doom. Lana Burroughs and Phillip Townstend are the researchers leading the project.
It is a strange quirk about robot mythology that, as a non-biological system, they do not necessarily have a
determinate life span. I know that already my body is deteriorating and the most I could reasonably ask for is an
extra 100 years on this earth. A robot such as Number 5 could, in principle, be constantly upgraded so that - baring
catastrophic accidents - he could live on indefinitely. Perhaps that is why in science fiction most robots fear the
catastrophic destruction rather than natural degeneration. (In a recent lecture, John Gray posited that even if we
humans were in the same position, the probability of accidents entails that we’d be unlikely to live longer than 600
years if aging was no longer an issue. So immortality would be a statistical impossibility even if it became a
biological possibility). By contrast, humans and animals both have to face up to physical perishing alongside the
chance of accidental death, so in that regard the anthropic animal is slightly more similar to human Dasein than
the anthropic object.
117 See DVD 3, Clip 6 - ‘The Onion’
116
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Phillip - When we first started the project with Quigley he was just a normal happy
ape, not a care in the world.
Lana - The first thing that we did was we taught him patterns, like 'red block, blue
block, green block' over and over. Then it became a pattern of 'gorilla born, gorilla
grow, gorilla die' over and over.
Nate (VO) - The researchers then showed Quigley photographs of dead and dying
gorillas while communicating the phrases 'you some day' and 'no choice'.
Phillip - It took thousands of repetitions, but Quigley finally became cognisant of the
correlation between himself and the decomposing pile of hair and flesh in the photo.
Nate (VO) - Quigley shared his feelings in a confessional after completing each
exercise.
Quigley (signing) - Muscles mine. Will rot away.
Lana - That was a great moment.
Nate (VO) - Quigley also began painting pictures like these almost every day. To make
sure Quigley retains the awareness of his own demise the team spends several hours a
day reinforcing the certainty of death's arrival.
Lana - Quigley, you die. You will die soon.
Quigley (signing) - Sad. Cry. Scared.
Nate - The researchers say that at first Quigley could only communicate rudimentary
fears about his own death but he soon moved on to expressing more complex
emotions, such as indifference and self-hatred.
Quigley - Stupid Quigley. Now see truth. Existence. Cruel joke.
Nate - And just two days ago Philip Townsend and his colleagues witnessed what they
believe to have been a panic attack in Quigley.
Quigley - Gorilla animal nooo! Gorilla no away.
Philip - He was letting out these anguished cries and banging his head against the wall
and I just thought - we did it!
In becoming aware of the gravity of his own death, Quigley understands his being as
something that is an issue for him, but moreover he feels the groundlessness that is
revealed in anxiety. On Dreyfus’ reading of Heidegger, this anxiety in the face of death
‘can be an analogon for living lucidly in such a way that the world is constantly seen to
be meaningless’ (Dreyfus 1997:311) On this view, authenticity is a ‘style’ in which one
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engages in one’s projects - one which ‘manifests my understanding that no specific
project can fulfill me or give my life meaning.’ (Dreyfus 1997:322)
[The authentic athlete] does not expect his dedication to and success in sports to
give his life intrinsic meaning because he lives in anxious certainty that no object
of concern can give his life that. Giving up hope for ultimate or intrinsic meaning
lets him see and appreciate relative meaning, like the difference between making
a brilliant basket and missing one. (Dreyfus 1997:323)
At this point, I feel I should be explicit that I have reservations about this account of
authenticity. Not because I believe it to be a misreading of Heidegger - I think this
interpretation has as much exegetic support as the narrativistic account of
authenticity - but rather I am not convinced that such a position is sustainable as a
way of living one’s life, as Dreyfus at points seems to suggest. It is perfectly possible
for one to have brief moments of ‘lucidity’, and I broadly agree that they can be
productive, but we cannot help but proceed with a conviction that our activities are
intrinsically meaningful and immerse ourselves ‘inauthentically’ into our projects
with that conviction. The lucidity that Dreyfus outlines, then, is not a way of living but
a sober wake-up call. In §4.3, we saw how Dylan Moran was able to make competitive
weight-lifting seem absurd by positioning us in a referential context exterior to those
invested in the activity. My suggestion is that this Dreyfusian lucidity allows us to do
the same thing to existence itself. This is at the heart of much ‘dark humour’ and will
be the subject of the next chapter, specifically §7.4, in which I will suggest that the
bodily failure can also act as a catalyst for anxiety which brings with it much mirth specifically, using Beckett’s Endgame as an example. For the moment, however, I
want to turn to the narrativistic reading of self and authenticity, at the heart of which
is Heidegger’s notion of temporality.
6.4.1 Self, Authenticity and Narrativity
In contrast to Dreyfus’ account, Guignon utilises Heidegger’s concept of temporality
in order to piece together an account of the self and the possibility of authenticity.
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Dasein is always “ahead of itself”: it is a projection into the future insofar as its
actions involve a commitment as to what sort of person it will be as a totality.
What this means is that, in taking a stand on its own life, Dasein takes some
range of possibilities as definitive of its own identity...[Similarly, its]
“thrownness” refers to
our being already enmeshed in a particular context.
As a parent, for example, I find myself stuck with obligations rooted in my past
undertakings that I must take up in my current actions. At the same time I also
find myself enmeshed in a particular historical culture that predefines the range
of possibilities of action that will make sense in my situation. (Guignon
1998:225)
This clearly has a lot of resonance with what I have been saying throughout this
chapter. Brian Griffin has found himself in a context in which dogs are treated with
less respect than human beings and on the basis of this he has fought for animal
rights. As I touched on in previous chapters, on the narrativistic view authenticity
entails facing up to the gravity of one’s death and constructing a narrative with one’s
life which is ‘true’ to one’s values. Understanding that one day my ‘story’ will end and
deciding what sort of story I want that to be means that I have to take authorship of it.
In doing so, my actions make me the sort of person that I am. As Guignon states,
'what is important is building myself as this kind of person, not scoring points or
getting rewards “down the road.” When life is lived as an ongoing process of selfbuilding or self-composing, it has the kind of cumulativeness and continuity that
makes up authentic temporality.' (Guignon 1998:231) This authentic temporality is
found when activities are undertaken not as a means to a certain end but as
constitutive of a certain ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ that one identifies as a fundamental
self-interpretation. To illustrate this idea, I want to turn now to another scene from
Family Guy, in which Brian decides to give his kidneys - and therefore his life - in
order to save the life of Peter.118
Doctor - As a dog, Brian's kidney's are smaller and don't have the capacity of a human
kidney. For the procedure to work we would have to transplant two.
Brian - But… but I only have two.
118
See DVD Appendix 3, Clip 7 - ‘Family Guy V’
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Doctor - That's right. The procedure would kill you. Pause Ha ha! That car's getting
towed!
Lois - My god, Dr. Hartman, isn't there any other way?
Doctor - I'm afraid not, Mrs. Griffin.
Brian - I'll do it.
Peter - What?
Brian - I'll…I'll do it. I'll give you my kidneys.
Lois - But Brian, you'll die.
Brian - Peter, you're my best friend. You gave me a home when I didn't have one and
you've treated me like a family member ever since. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for
you. I would probably be dead anyway lying under some freeway overpass and…I
wanna return the favour. After all, I'm a dog, I have another eight years at best. I'm
willing to give that up so that you can have another forty.
Peter - Brian, I don't know what to say. You're saving my life.
Brian - Well, you saved mine. And hey, we had a lot of good years together, right?
Peter - Yeah, we sure did buddy.
So, with the framework I have been developing, we can see that Brian has several selfinterpretations - as an author, a civil-rights activist and as a friend. These are
constitutive of his existence and sense of self, and the narrative that will end upon his
death will feature these themes prominently. However, the latter self-interpretation is
one that he is not only committed to living for, but prepared to die for. At this point,
we can understand what Heidegger means when he says that the (non-anthropic)
animal lives but it does not exist - Dasein is capable of ‘owning’ its own existence deciding the terms upon which it is prepared to live and die. We can choose to starve
ourselves in front of a plate of food out of protest for a social or political ideal - as far
as I know only humans can do this, and in my view any animal that could do that
would be anthropic.119
119 I have said previously, specifically in §3.2.1, that the term ‘anthropic’ is a potentially misleading misnomer, but
it is worth reminding ourselves once again of this fact. Although in Heidegger’s work Dasein does refer to human
beings, it could in principle refer to other beings that have an understanding of being. This is ultimately what is at
issue here - the creature is anthropic - which is to say it is Dasein- if it is a being-in-the-world, regardless of what it
looks like.
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The main claim that I have made throughout this section (and this chapter more
broadly) is that we understand each other and ourselves narrativistically. Indeed, I
would argue that self is narratively constructed - it is, to borrow a phrase from
Dennett (1992), the ‘centre of narrative gravity’.120 It is an open question - and a point
of heated debate - as to whether this is the correct reading of Heidegger. I feel I
should be explicit in stating that I am not defending this position as a correct
interpretation of Heidegger’s view, but rather I am defending this position as a correct
interpretation of the phenomena I experience. In short, I believe it regardless of
whether or not Heidegger did.
I would suggest that it is because the self is the centre of narrative gravity that it can
endure physical changes and metamorphoses. Technically, almost every cell in my
body has died and been replaced since I was first born and yet, despite this, I still
endure. This change is minor in comparison to the next example I will focus on Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s short story Metamorphosis.
6.5 Humans Becoming Animal
Eventually my life will end and when that happens all those things that I never got
round to doing will simply be things I never did. What I was will be defined by what I
did, therefore my present activities are self-constituting. It is in these terms that we
understand ourselves, and each other, and it is on this basis that we can understand
change, transformation and metamorphosis. A recovering alcoholic has undertaken a
profound change in his self-interpretation and so in that sense he is a 'changed man'.
However, this change has happened on the background of a life-story that started
before he touched a drop of whiskey and will end with his death, and the 'self' is the
centre of narrative gravity that is perceived to have endured throughout.121 I want to
look now at the character of Gregor Samsa to see how his change can be understood
in terms of the framework that I have been developing throughout this thesis.
120 Importantly, in my view H. Sapiens are the only animals that self-narrate in this specific way and as such they
are unique in having a ‘self’.
121 Like Theseus’s ship or, to use an example from comedy, Trigger’s broom (in Only Fools and Horses) this does
not entail that is persists in the everyday sense of ‘persistence’. Nonetheless, we are able to meaningfully refer to it
as a singular enduring thing, and I suspect this adds to the perception of it as something which endures
throughout.
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When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found
himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect. He was lying on his hard
shell-like back and by lifting his head a little he could see his curved brown belly,
divided by stiff arching ribs, on top of which the bed-quilt was precariously
poised and seemed about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were
pathetically thin compared to the rest of his bulk, danced helplessly before his
eyes. 'What has happened to me?' he thought. (Kafka 2000:71)
What, indeed, has happened to Gregor? It is, perhaps, tempting to understand this
transformation as a human mind having been transposed into the body of another
creature. Hopefully by now the reader will have a sense of why I would object to this
interpretation. Such dualism is profoundly confused, in my opinion, and rests upon a
grave category mistake. If there is no 'ghost in the machine' to begin with then it
cannot be simply be a case of the ghost relocating. I want to suggest that narrativity
can do all the necessary work to understand this transition. The metamorphosis in
question was a bodily affair and the mental predicates we are inclined to use have
their referents out here in the world. As Mulhall states, ‘[what] maintains our
conviction as readers in Gregor's humanity is the fact that he never loses his narrative
function as our point of view upon events, and so never loses his status as being
possessed of a perspective upon his own existence (at least, not until he no longer
exists at all).’ (Mulhall 2007:142)
In other words, despite being transformed into an insect, Gregor is a being-in-theworld. His being is an issue for him, and he still has commitments and projects that
are deeply important to him. The tragedy of the story is that his new body prevents
him from fulfilling them. In this way, his plight can be read as analogous to the bodily
failure that we all experience - to a greater or lesser extent - at some point in our lives,
and particularly as we grow old.122 For several pages the author outlines the difficulty
Gregor has getting out of bed - as the author states, ‘he would have needed arms and
hands to raise himself to a sitting position; but instead he only had these numerous
122 I would suggest that a more severe metamorphosis would cause not just a deprived relation to the world but a
wholesale collapse of that world. However, I do not think that is what’s happening in Metamorphosis. In my view,
for the whole time that he is alive, Gregor never ceases to be anthropic.
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legs which...he was unable to control.’ (Kafka 2000:79) Ten pages later, once they find
firm ground, Gregor finds his legs 'obeying him perfectly', but there is still much he
cannot do in his new form owing to the fact that he no longer has hands. This is
brought out forcefully when one considers the picture that he protects with his injured
body. This picture, which it is established earlier he made by cutting images out of a
magazine, ‘represents his creative impulse- a trace of his ability to make his own
individual mark on the world, at a time when he had hands with which to make such a
mark.’ (Mulhall 2007:140-1)
In the build up to this, Gregor's sister and mother decide to remove everything from
his room so that he is able to freely crawl around. This action was undoubtedly
motivated by their desire to do what was best for Gregor, yet for him it was a sign of
him losing his ‘humanity’. By this, I mean that he was still ontologically Daseinal, yet
ontically his non-human form places factical limitations on his projects.123 The
referential context was no longer structuring his activities - the desk at which he had
always done his homework as a child, for example, was no longer ready-to-hand (as
he no longer has hands) - and yet he still has an enduring connection to it. He wanted
it to stay there as a reminder of who he used to be. Clearly Gregor still has a
relationship to his past, the projects he undertook and the equipment that he used.
The fact that his body factically limits his ability to continue with those projects does
not mean that he is no longer in the world - he still understands the desk as a desk,
even though this is a rather deprived understanding. Similarly, he still relates to his
family as other Dasein.
He never loses his consuming concern for his family's well-being; indeed, its
inherently self-destructive tendency finds its ultimate expression in his willing
embrace of death by starvation, understood by him as a way of ending the
suffering that his new existence inflicts on his family. (Mulhall 2007:139)
Despite being transformed into an insect, Gregor is able to sacrifice himself for the
well-being of his family. This is precisely because he is still an anthropic creature, or
Dasein. Much like Brian Griffin choosing to die so that Peter can live, Gregor chooses
To be absolutely clear - being a member of the species H. Sapiens is an ontic, factical matter. Being anthropic which is to say, being Dasein - is an ontological one.
123
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to die so that his family is no longer burdened by looking after him. Whether or not
that was the right choice is beside the point - my claim is that only anthropic creatures
can choose death (or life), because it is only for Dasein that it's own being is an issue
for it. Moreover, such actions are only coherent as part of a broader narrative in which
Gregor’s projecting towards the possibility of his death is linked to an ongoing
concern about his family and his past with them.
6.5.1 Private Languages and Beetles in a Box
While we are on the topic of Metamorphosis, it is perhaps worth discussing language
and the privacy of Gregor's utterances.124 I have previously claimed that a truly private
language could not be meaningful because there would be no criteria against which
usage could be deemed correct or incorrect.125 It is established in the novella that
Gregor speaks but nobody understands him - ‘the words he uttered were evidently no
longer intelligible, despite the fact that they had seemed clear enough to him’. (Kafka
2000:85) Thus, it seems that it is conceivable for an utterance to be privately
intelligible.
However, it is my contention that his utterances are not truly private - the reader is
given a 'god's eye view' of the whole affair. Gregor's inner monologue is rendered
intelligible by the narrator's eccentric position - he allows us to 'hear' the internal
monologue of Gregor and the external ones of the Samsa family. We are able to
appreciate the incommensurability precisely because the narrator acts as a bridge.
Moreover, I never denied the existence of an internal monologue - rather, I asserted
that such privacy is only possible on the basis of us previously having learnt to speak
intelligently aloud.
It should also be noted that the language problems Gregor encounters are not
symmetrical - Gregor continues to understand his family although his family cannot
understand him. As such, there are still normative criteria at work ‘out here’ in the
124 This issue of privacy is the main reason why I have focussed on Kafka’s novella rather than any one of the many
stagings of it. Staging the tale necessarily ‘externalises’ his ‘inner monologue’, and in this section that ‘inner
monologue’ is precisely what is at issue.
125 See §2.1.3
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world - he might have previously been mistaken about the pronunciation of
'overzealous' and learnt of his mistake when he heard his sister use it correctly. I don't
think there is any reason to suppose that Gregor was 'speaking in mentalese' and the
problem was in the translation from mentalese to a shared language. Rather, his
failed attempts at communication were failed attempts to join in with a practical
activity. By way of analogy, I am a poor tennis player but I would not suggest that the
problem lies in my not being able to translate ‘the moves in my mind' into movements
in my body. It is correct to say that 'I know what to do but I am unable to do it'. But
rather than indicating a gulf between my mind and my body, it indicates a deficit in
my know-how which cannot be compensated with know-that. In short, both Gregor's
failed speech and my failed sportsmanship are practical failures, not 'mental
translation' ones.
It is a prerequisite of failure that success is a possibility - a chair can neither save a
penalty nor fail to do so, because this would require that it was participating in the
interlocking practices that constitute a game of football. In the same way, a creature
can only fail to speak if speaking is a possibility for it - that is, if it is a being in the
world. So, although it initially seemed like the case of Gregor Samsa's language usage
was problematic for the framework that I have been developing, I would claim that is
in fact further evidence of his being in the world.
6.5.2 Response to Critchley
In this chapter so far, I have argued that both Brian Griffin and Gregor Samsa are
clear examples of anthropic animals. The former has always been an animal but
Gregor used to be a human. Thus, what the last case study was tacitly addressing was
the issue of transition - what it means for a human to become an animal, or more
specifically for a human Dasein to collapse into factical animality. Perhaps now is the
right time for me to address that question more explicitly.
Simon Critchley claims that ‘there is something charming about an animal become
human but when the human becomes animal the result is disgusting’. (Critchley
2004:34) Regarding the latter point, does the character of Gregor Samsa disgust us?
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Admittedly he has tastes in food that we are less inclined to and his physical form is
rather unsightly but I would argue that he is the character for which we have the most
sympathy. He remains anthropic but he is stripped of his dignity and humanity
because of his form. Part of the problem with Critchley’s formulation is that the
disgust is rather ill defined. I don’t think the disgust that Critchley identifies precludes
sympathy, and it would be rather simplistic and one-dimensional to focus on disgust
in Metamorphosis and ignore the sympathy. I would like to suggest that part of the
tragedy of Gregor Samsa’s plight is that his metamorphosis is rather like the change
that one encounters in aging, disease and disability. The dehumanisation that occurs,
then, is not exclusively due to the physical condition, but also the rejection that he
encounters from the other Dasein around him. A similar thing is found in
Cronenberg’s film, The Fly, which I would like to address to draw out Carel’s
argument about the transformation qua illness.
In The Fly, the gifted scientist Seth Brundle creates a machine that can teleport
anything from one place to another. (Technically, it annihilates the thing in one pod
and recreates it in another - something that would be deeply problematic if the self
were not, as I argue it is, narratively constructed). After teleporting himself when
there was also a fly in the pod, the machine fuses Seth and the fly into a genetic
concoction he sardonically names ‘the Brundlefly’. Cronenberg himself explicitly
states that he sees Brundle’s transformation as a metaphor for disease - but rather
than being a specific disease, such as Aids (which was suggested by a number of
commentators), he sees it more generally as ‘the disease of being finite’. As he states,
‘we’ve all got the disease - the disease of being finite. And consciousness is the original
sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death.’ (Cronenberg in Rodley 1992:128)
Drawing on Cronenberg’s statements, Havi Carel argues against readings of The Fly
that understand the film as a simple story of a man turning into a monster.
This reading does not fully appreciate Seth’s humanness throughout the film and
as such falls into the trap Cronenberg sets for the viewer. The trap is contained
in the thought that Seth is slowly losing his humanity simply because his body is
trans-humanly transformed. I believe that Seth does not become a monster. He
becomes a man with a diseased body that is perceived as a monster by the other
characters. Throughout the film we watch a man grappling with the changes and
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decay of his body, the grotesque malformations that result from its mutations,
and his resulting abjection. But throughout the film Seth is - and remains thoroughly human. (Carel 2007a)
This is rather similar to what I have been claiming about Gregor Samsa - although his
transformation from human to insect places factical limitations on the projects that
he can pursue, the character never stops being anthropic. In other words, both Gregor
and Seth have an understanding of their being - Seth desperately wants to be human
again, and this fact also makes us pity him. The moments of sardonic humour present
in The Fly reflects Seth’s anthropic nature. Towards the end of the film he says, ‘My
teeth have begun to fall out. The medicine cabinet [in which they are kept] is now the
Brundle Museum of Natural History’. This dark line indicates that he is still relating
to himself and his situation as a Dasein. Even at the very end, when he is transformed
into a truly disgusting fly-machine hybrid, he holds the gun to his head in a manner
that suggests he wants Ronnie to pull the trigger. Non-anthropic creatures cannot do
either of these things, because to do the former requires an understanding of what a
museum is and the latter requires an understanding of both the equipment (gun) and
one’s own finitude.
I would like to suggest that the disgust that Critchley identifies is definitely present in
many human-to-animal transformations, but he completely overlooks the way in
which the disgust is often rooted in how the transformation is analogous to physical
disease, and the way in which society responds to the abject diseased or disabled
body.126 Moreover, this disgust does not say anything about the ontological status of
the character portrayed - people were disgusted by John Merrick (the eponymous
deformed man in The Elephant Man) but the whole point of the film is that he is still
a Dasein (and, indeed still a Homo Sapien), despite the way he is treated. (Lynch
1980)
Of course, Critchley does not completely overlook the role that the body has in animal
humour. As he states, ‘animal jokes are a sort of code for the body and its rather
wayward desires’ (Critchley 2004:47). In other words, they refer to the sort of
126
This will be the subject of the next chapter, so I will pursue it no further here.
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activities that we hide behind the closed doors of the bathroom and bedroom. It
seems that it might be worth returning to the case of the dog that defecates at Crufts.
In this case, I argued that the dog was not subject to the same sort of scrutiny that the
Miss World contestant would be if she did the same thing. This is precisely because
the latter has an understanding of the context and as a result is subject to a level of
normativity that does not trouble the dog. In this case, the disgust that occurs when
the ‘human becomes animal’ is nothing to do with the ontological shift that I am
interested in but the transgression of societal norms. Indeed, if the human truly
became an animal then it would not be anthropic any longer and so would not be
open to the same criticism. After all, babies - the quintessential non-anthropic
humans - are unperturbed by societal norms when they want to defecate. Generally
we refrain from criticising them for this because they ‘don’t know any better’. There is
a point at which we expect humans to tow the line when it comes to excremental
norms, and after that point we might use animality as a metaphor to describe their
transgressions. However, we should not lose sight of the metaphorical nature of these
descriptions - ultimately they are not making the same sort of ontological claims that I
am making about Brian Griffin or Gregor Samsa.
One example that I think is problematic for Critchley’s dichotomy is Bottom from A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, which does not seem to invoke the same disgust as the
other examples. In this play, the character is magically given the head of an ass.
However, the fact that he doesn’t really notice the transformation indicates that it has
not had the same negative effect as Gregor or Seth’s metamorphoses. That is to say, it
doesn’t really act as a metaphor for illness. However, I have not tried to claim that this
is a universal feature of this sort of phenomenon, so I am less troubled by the counterexample as Critchley should be. I would like to suggest that perhaps what is comical
about Bottom’s transition is that it really hasn’t made any change to his lifestyle at all.
He was a rather ‘asinine’127 character to begin with, a fact that was highlighted by the
transition. The aim of this chapter is not to try to draw out generalised rules for this
type of humour but understand it in terms of the ‘hermeneutic conditions’ of humour
- being in the world. In cases such as Metamorphosis and The Fly where the
transformation is analogous to disease, the change places factical limits upon our
127
Using a more literal etymological sense of the word, along the vein of ‘like an ass’.
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being-in-the-world and the abject body is a source of disgust. In other cases, as
outlined by Critchley, the animal body trangresses the social norms surrounding our
‘basic’ bodily functions. In further cases, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the
transformation might cause very little behavioural change, highlighting the fact that
the character was already quite bestial in his comportment to begin with.128
Now let’s consider the other side of the coin - the anthropic animal. Is this invariably
charming, as Critchley seems to suggest? As I mentioned previously, I’m not so
convinced. When the pigs in Animal Farm become anthropic and then oppress their
fellow animals, the effect is far from charming! I’m not even sure that this implies that
they are ‘disgusting’ either, as the dichotomy seems to be rather underdeveloped. I
don’t deny that the anthropic animal can be charming - Disney have made billions of
dollars exploiting the fact that they can be - but I don’t think this charm is particularly
important when it comes to the ontological question at issue. Anthropic animals can
charm and delight us, just as any Dasein can, but this says almost nothing about their
ontological character. The character of the anthropic animal is defined by the projects
that it undertakes, and whether it is charming or abhorrent is dependent upon that it can be the animal equivalent of Michael Palin or Adolf Hitler, and ought to be
judged on this basis rather than any ontological criteria. This seems almost too
obvious to be worth stating, but it is a point that Critchley seems to gloss over. The
main thing that is worth noting is that it is only once the animal is truly anthropic that is, once it understands something as something, or more precisely Dasein as
Dasein - that we can really make any moral judgements about it. The lion that kills the
antelope is neither moral nor immoral - rather, it is amoral because it lacks the
hermeneutic conditions for moral ascriptions. This is precisely what is missed by
Critchley’s account.
6.6 The Anthropic Animal ‘Collapsing Back into Animality’
As I stated at the beginning of the chapter, much of what I have said about the
anthropic animal is equally applicable to other Dasein (i.e. anthropic humans and
It could be argued that this is reflects a satirical portrayal of the working class and whilst I suspect that this is an
aspect of the character, I don’t particularly want to pursue this reading here.
128
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anthropic objects). Fundamentally, they are characterised by being-in-the-world and
as such have an understanding of being including their own being - which entails that
they understand their own finitude and hence can exist either authentically or
inauthentically. However, the anthropic animal is distinct from human Dasein in one
regard - we saw that the human becoming animal-like often invoked disgust, but the
animal ‘collapsing back’ into more stereotypical animal behaviours can have a more
benignly comical effect. For example, in Series 4 Episode 15 of Family Guy, we see
Brian deciding to drop out of university, to which Lois responds in a rather novel
way.129
Lois - Brian, what are you doing home?
Brian - Lois, I couldn't do it. You know, I thought I'd be able to finish this time, but I
just don't have what it takes to be a college graduate.
Lois - But you're so close - I mean, your final exam's tomorrow. You can't just give up.
You could study tonight and I think if you really work at it…
Brian - Lois, Lois. It's over, alright. I'm not going.
Lois - Well, whatever you say.
She goes over to the cupboard and opens it, reveals a vacuum cleaner.
Lois - Hey, what's in this closet?
Brian - Err…what are you…what are you doing?
Lois - Well, my my - Mr. Hoover's come to visit!
Brian - I don't want to see Mr. Hoover.
Lois - I wonder if Mr. Hoover has anything to say about all this…
Brian - Lois, this is not funny. I really don't want to see Mr. Hoover.
Lois starts up the vacuum cleaner, Brian jumps off the sofa to flee. She chases him
around the room.
Brian - Stop it, stop it. It's scaring me! Leave me alone! It's so loud.
He hides behind an armchair and barks at it.
Brian - Stop, stop! Stop it! Alright, alright, I'll study. I'll study.
Lois - I'll help you if you want.
Brian - No thanks, Lois, there is only one person who can help me.
129
See DVD Appendix 3, Clip 8 - ‘Family Guy VI’
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The decision to go back to university, and the subsequent decision to drop out of it,
lies at the very heart of Brian’s self-interpretations. When he talks about having ‘what
it takes to be a college graduate’, clearly he has a notion of the prestige that goes along
with attending an Ivy League university, and a self-interpretation as someone who is
not capable of achieving that. In fact, it could be argued that this prestige is built on
the fact that not everyone is able to get into the institution, and not everyone that does
attend ‘has what it takes’ to graduate. This sort of understanding is indicative of his
being-in-the-world – there aren’t any equivalents to the Ivy League in the animal
kingdom. Usually the decision to persevere with education is done with respect to
these self-interpretations, which makes the encounter with ‘Mr. Hoover’ deeply
incongruous. This irrational fear of the vacuum cleaner, which he shares with many
other dogs, simply does not make sense to us. Whilst some people might be coaxed
into going to a specific university by parental affection (or wanting to avoid
‘disappointing them’), or the offer of a new car, the notion that such a decision might
hinge upon a fear of an everyday appliance is laughably strange. It is difficult to
understand the sort of threat that he sees it as presenting, but it is a common trait
amongst dogs.
Wittgenstein suggested that if a lion could speak then we would not be able to
understand it. (Wittgenstein 2001:223) In §2.4.1, I suggested that he means that we
speak as we do because of the world that we share, and that the world-poor
understanding of the animal is so fundamentally different that its ‘worldview’ is
incommensurable with our own. I would suggest that the almost pathological fear that
some dogs have of vacuum cleaners is indicative of this – it does not understand the
vacuum cleaner as a vacuum cleaner (i.e. how it relates to the interlocking practices
and equipment of the world), and I don’t understand the vacuum cleaner as a
mysterious-object-to-fear. I would suggest that this is why we might laugh at the
irrational fear that our pets have of the vacuum cleaner.
However, I have suggested throughout this chapter that the fact that Brian speaks the
same language as us indicates that we share a world with him. In contrast to the
actions of our pet, which at times seems ludicrous because we do not share a world,
for the most part Brian’s actions are completely intelligible to us. This is because, as I
have been pressing throughout this chapter, we understand him as a locus of projects
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with self-interpretations that informs those projects. When he suddenly reverts back
to animality his actions become strange – we can no longer understand them in those
terms. Moreover, I would suggest that the incongruity is more acute in the ‘Mr.
Hoover’ scene precisely because it is performed on the background of his selfinterpretation as someone who is ‘bright, but not quite bright enough to graduate’. In
one way, this incongruity is rather similar to that found in a ‘clash of cultures’, which
plays on the way that certain foreign practices are so different to ours that they seem
laughably peculiar.130 The similarity between both of these examples and Dylan
Moran’s treatment of Schwarzenegger’s weightlifting is not coincidental - all practices
are only intelligible from a position of interiority and as such they seem peculiar to
anyone outside of that context. Animal life is separated from human experience by a
gulf that simply cannot be traversed - if we truly became an animal then we would
cease to have the understanding that could render our experience intelligible to
Dasein. As such it should be no surprise that moments of the anthropic animal
‘collapsing back’ into animality would seem laughably peculiar.
This is only skimming the surface of a phenomenon that could be addressed in much
greater detail, and the main reason that I haven’t pursued it further here is that I
don’t want us to get too distracted from the main ontological claims that I am making.
I would suggest that ‘collapsing back into animality’ is a unique possibility open to the
anthropic animal because of its ontological status as an anthropic animal. Yet it is not
its defining feature. The titular character of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, (Zemeckis
1988) for example, never collapses back into animality in this way – in fact, the
character could have been a human without much change to the script. (After all, his
wife is a cartoon human). Fundamentally, I would suggest that Lois Griffin, Brian
Griffin, Roger Rabbit and Jessica Rabbit are all ontologically the same – they are
examples of Dasein. However, within Family Guy one finds a particular comedy trope
– the anthropic animal ‘collapsing back into animality’, thereby disclosing the
incommensurable gap between Daseinal and animal understanding. Roger Rabbit
does not do this, so functionally he is indistinguishable from Lois and Jessica.
130 Nowadays comedies that hinge on a ‘clash of cultures’ seem rather dated - perhaps because of globalisation, or
maybe because of the much-bemoaned ‘political correctness’. Either way, I suspect that white middle-class
comedians might be more successful attempting to get laughs out of animal otherness than cultural otherness. In
both cases it could be argued that what we are laughing at is a clash of facticities - the ‘funny foreigner’ doesn’t
know how to use our equipment, the dog isn’t physically able to.
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Nonetheless I would suggest that due to the fact that he is an anthropic animal it is
always a latent source of humour. 131
6.7 Conclusion
The main reason I thought it important to treat the anthropic animal separately from
the anthropic object is because we need to distinguish Dasein’s understanding from
that of the world-poor (i.e. non-anthropic) animal. Unlike the chair, it lives. But
unlike Dasein, it does not exist. However, once it is anthropic it is Dasein, so
everything I said about the anthropic animal in §6.2 - 6.4 is equally applicable to
anthropic humans and objects. §6.5 and §6.6 are the only sections in which I made
claims about the anthropic animal that do not apply to the other ‘varieties of Dasein’.
In §6.5, I addressed what it means for a ‘human to become animal’ and argued that
the disgust that Critchley identifies is often due to the transition acting as a metaphor
either for disease or for transgressions of norms regarding bodily functions. In neither
case does this disgust impinge on the ontological status of the animal - both Gregor
Samsa and the Brundlefly are Dasein despite being disgusting. Indeed, I suggested in
respect to the ‘bodily functions’ sort of disgust that it presupposes that the character is
still anthropic - after all, we don’t chastise a baby for transgressing excremental
norms because it doesn’t know any better. In §6.6, I argued that the anthropic animal
is able to make us laugh by ‘collapsing back’ into animality. But whereas the human
Dasein becoming animal-like often invokes disgust, the animal doing the same tends
not to, and moreover it allows us to appreciate the peculiarity of animal practices.
In addition to drawing out the contrast between the anthropic and non-anthropic
animal, §6.2 - 6.4 prepared the foundations for the final chapter, in which I will
address the subject of bodily failure in comic performance. As we saw in the example
of Gregor Samsa and Seth Brundle, the body places factical limits upon the projects
one can undertake in the world and how one relates to both equipment and other
131 Another element of humour in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? that I haven’t really touched on is the difference
between ‘Toons’ and humans. The laws of physics apply differently to Toons – they can survive incidents that
would kill a human, such as an anvil falling on them or a steamroller running them over. At some point I would
like to write a paper on such ‘cartoon physics’, but I suspect it’s outside of the scope of this thesis.
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Dasein. However, I am going to go further and suggest that, like death, the body
failing can induce an anxiety which reveals that meaning is determined not by some
‘ultimate ground’ but simply shared practices, and makes us feel the groundlessness
that this implies. I will suggest that this is precisely what is at play in the dark humour
of Beckett’s Endgame. I will also suggest that it is also possible to laugh in the face of
bodily impairment in a manner congruent with the narrativistic reading of
authenticity, using Francesca Martinez’s stand-up as a case study which exemplifies
this position.
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7. Phenomenology of Bodily Impairment
In this chapter, I address a range of bodily impairments within comic performance.
First, we will look at the ‘possessed hand’, in which it is diegetically established that a
performer’s limb is being controlled against their will by another agent. I will argue
that we can understand this phenomenon as an ‘anthropic limb’ - that is, a limb which
ostensibly has projects that diverge from those of the ‘owner’ - using an excerpt from
Nina Conti’s work to exemplify the continuity between the animated puppet and the
anthropic limb. This will develop into a discussion of multiple personalities
‘inhabiting’ the same body, specifically using the example of the Jim Carrey film Me,
Myself and Irene. In my view, the phenomenon of ‘multiple personalities’ is
continuous with the phenomenon of the anthropic limb because in both cases there
are more than one set of projects being followed by more than one self, despite the
fact that both of these selves are embodied together.
At this point it might be worth clarifying the terminology used here. First, and most
fundamental, there is the ontological level. Whenever I refer to something as being
anthropic, or when I discuss Dasein, I am describing an ontological phenomenon.
Secondly, and derivatively, there is the ontic level. Whenever I discuss the self,
‘personality’ or ‘character’, I am describing an ontic phenomenon. Importantly, I want
to suggest that it is a fundamental structure of Dasein - its narratability132 - which
gives rise to the phenomenon of self. In short, the self is constructed through Dasein’s
narrativistic comportment. It is important that we understand that it is only on the
basis of our being-in-the-world that we are able to narrativise in such a manner, and
as such this being-in-the-world is more fundamental than our ontic self and
commitments.
After I have addressed these issues, I will then turn my attention to the three
categories of ‘malfunction’, ‘temporary breakdown’ and ‘permanent breakdown’. I will
suggest that in terms of Dasein’s stance there is a notable similarity between the
object and bodily failure. However, regarding what precisely is disclosed, I will
A term coined by Fisher (2010a) to refer to ‘the basic phenomenological condition for...self-interpretive praxis’.
(Fisher 2010a:255)
132
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suggest that the latter failure discloses Dasein’s facticity and, as Noël Carroll suggests,
the bodily intelligence that is necessary for skilful coping in the world.
In §7.3, I will look at Havi Carel’s claim that bodily impairment can inaugurate a
change in one’s temporal phenomenology, and I will suggest that this allows for
‘temporal incongruity’ in which two characters in a scene operate with different
‘temporal horizons’, thereby creating an incongruous encounter between them.
Following on from this, I will suggest that the entropic nature of one’s physical body –
that is, the inevitability of its breakdown – grounds Dasein as ‘thrown projection’ and
its being-towards-death. I will suggest that, because of this, physical impairment has
the potential to induce an existential anxiety, using the bodily impairments that one
encounters in Beckett’s Endgame to illustrate this idea. Although there have been a
couple of notable Heideggerean readings of Beckett133 and almost innumerable
‘existential’ readings (perhaps most famously Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd), I am
hoping to draw out a slightly different position. Throughout this thesis, I have argued
that the world is the source of all meaning and intelligibility - a claim that seems to be
at odds with the ‘absurdist’ position often attributed to Beckett, in which a
fundamental meaninglessness of the world seems to be at issue.134 However, I agree
with Cavell, who argues that ‘the discovery of Endgame...is not the failure of meaning
(if that means the lack of meaning) but its total, even totalitarian, success’. (Cavell
1969:117) I will argue, following Cavell, that meaninglessness is not a given in which
the characters find themselves but an achievement of the work itself. In my view,
precisely what is at issue in Endgame is the way in which the ‘relational finitude’
constitutive of physical impairment can induce anxiety which reveals the fundamental
groundlessness of the world. Although I do try to engage with some of the literary
theory surrounding Endgame, I think it is best to explicitly state that my engagement
with Beckett is not an enterprise in literary criticism. Rather, I am using Endgame to
exemplify a more general phenomenon – physical impairment. In principle I could
have used a different example to tease out the same ideas. The main reason I have
chosen Endgame is because I think it elucidates the phenomenon more clearly than
Perhaps most notably Lance St. John Butler’s (1989) Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being.
In Heideggerean terms, we could say that this absurdity is a deficiency of meaning that is understood against
the background of the intelligibility of the world. This is a different position to that found in Sartre’s Nausea.
133
134
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other potential examples, perhaps because of Beckett’s fascination with certain
germane themes.
Building on the tension between the Dreyfusian and Narrativistic accounts of
Heideggerean authenticity, I will attempt to draw out a complementary ‘narrativistic’
portrait of impairment. This account will be exemplified by Francesca Martinez’s
show, What the F*** is Normal? and her political activism more broadly. Martinez is
a comedian with Cerebral Palsy who, through her work, attempts to raise awareness
and change attitudes towards disability. In this way, I will argue that her response is
more desirable than the embrace of impotence that Critchley seems to encourage.
7.1 ‘Anthropic Bodies’
7.1.1 ‘Possessed’ Hands
Let us now turn to the first sort of bodily impairment - the ‘possessed’ limb - which I
think is demonstrated brilliantly by a double act that we have seen once before in this
thesis. In the scene that follows, Nina Conti allows Monkey to ‘control’ her hand,
which then enables him to ‘take over’ her whole body.135
Monkey - I want to control you.
Nina - How can you control me?
Monkey - It’s easy, stick my hand up your arse.
Nina - Oh, come on. No way.
Monkey - There is another way.
Nina - What’s that?
Monkey - Get the bag.
Nina - Get the bag? Already?
Monkey - Yes.
Nina picks up the bag.
Monkey - Put me in the bag.
Nina - Already? But I’ll miss you.
135
See DVD Appendix 4, Clip 1 - ‘Nina Conti II’
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Monkey - It’s okay, I’ll still be here.
Monkey goes into the bag.
Monkey - Now take your hand out of me.
Nina - No, I don’t want to.
Monkey - Go on. Pause. Oh, it feels nice and nasty at the same time.
Nina - Okay, now what do I do? It’s out.
Monkey - Take your hand out of the bag.
Nina - Take my hand out?
Hand pops out (animated with Monkey’s voice).
Hand/Monkey - Go on, force yourself.
Nina - Oh, I don’t like it.
Hand/Monkey - Don’t you like me naked?
Nina - No, I miss the Monkey.
Hand/Monkey - I am the monkey, you schizophrenic bitch! Put the bag down.
Nina puts the bag down.
Nina - Oh, it’s freaky, I feel so ashamed. What do I do now?
Hand/Monkey - Are you ready?
Nina - I don’t know what for.
Hand/Monkey - Put this hand down by your side.
Nina does so.
Hand/Monkey - But I’m still here.
Nina - Where are you now?
Hand/Monkey - I’m in your mind.
Nina - The laughter’s got a little bit uneasy…
Hand/Monkey - It’s okay, it’s just for charity.
Nina - What do I do now?
Hand/Monkey - Are you ready for the final step? Here I come…
Nina - No, stay where you are.
Hand/Monkey - Here I come, here I come.
Nina jolts and then starts speaking with Monkey’s voice.
Nina/Monkey - Here I am! Oh, at last I’m in the bitch! And you are all a bit freaked
out, now, aren’t you. Quite a sweet voice on a monkey but with tits it’s fucking
sinister.
Nina breaks out of the Nina/Monkey character
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Nina - Thank you very much, good night!
This is not the only example of a possessed hand in popular comedy. The protagonist
from Evil Dead II has to cut off his hand because it has been mystically possessed and
attacks him. Similarly, the 1999 teen comedy Idle Hands features a teenage slacker
who finds that his hand has been possessed and has been killing people while he
sleeps - a discovery that leads to conflict between the two. Crucially, the common
thread through all of these examples is that the ‘possessed’ limb seems to have
projects of its own - it is anthropic.136 However, what this scene by Nina Conti
demonstrates is that in performance the anthropic limb shares the same fundamental
features as the animated puppet.
In §5.1, I made two key claims regarding puppetry ‘manipulaction’; 1. there needs to
be more than one referential context structuring more than one set of projects. 2. the
manipulactor needs to split her body schema in order for us to perceive two individual
characters onstage rather than one character and an inanimate object (or in this case,
hand). In the scene above, it is established that Nina and the Monkey/Hand have
different projects and intentions that diverge and clash. We can map the two
characters onto the referential structure outlined in §5.1. M1 is Nina Conti, a
performer manipulating a puppet, and later her own hand, for the sake of
entertaining an audience. M2 is the monkey character, who attempts to take over
Nina’s body. As with the previous case, the incongruity in the scene lies in the fact that
these two referential contexts are in tension with each other. The gag where Monkey
asks Nina to stick his hand ‘up her arse’ alludes to the fictitiousness of the situation (it
could be described as a meta-joke, playing on the clichéd ‘what’s your hand doing up
my jacksey’ joke mentioned earlier). I argued in §5.1 that ‘only the anthropic objects
can have a referential context, and therefore it can have projects and intentions of its
own’. In my view, this is equally true of the limb found in the example above, and thus
I believe I am correct in calling it anthropic. In addition to this, (picking up the second
claim regarding manipulaction), I believe that this scene clearly demonstrates the
split in body schema that I discussed previously.
136 In my view, Dr. Strangelove’s hand is a different phenomenon and it is rather misleading that alien hand
syndrome is sometimes colloquially called ‘Dr. Strangelove syndrome’. Dr. Strangelove is more akin to a bizarre
form of tourettes in which his repressed views come to the fore - it is not, as far as I can make out, a case of
‘possession’.
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Although the anthropic hand might seem to be a comically bizarre phenomenon,
there is actually a clinical condition known as ‘Alien Hand Syndrome’ in which the
limb seems to have intentions of its own. It is very rare and, because of that, there is
very little literature on the topic.137 Often the condition seems to be linked to damage
to the Corpus Collosum - the tissue that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.
However, I am not a trained clinician and I don’t imagine that I have anything to
contribute to the literature on the condition. Moreover, attempts to do so are far
beyond the remit of this thesis, which is a phenomenology of humour. I mention this
fact to underline that although this might seem like a ridiculous and marginal
phenomenon, it is not exclusively the terrain of performance. Everything I have said
above does not distinguish Conti’s experience on stage from that of the individual
with Alien Hand Syndrome. All of the phenomenological description in Part Two of
this thesis - including the descriptions to follow in this chapter - have been
undertaken from the point of view of the spectator. Of course, there is a crucial
difference between the experience of the performer and the audience’s point-of-view.
I do not deny that this is an important and interesting perspective, but I would argue
that pursuing this adequately would require another thesis of equal length to this one.
As such, I have refrained from attempting such an enterprise here.
Before moving away from the issue of ‘anthropic bodies’ more generally, it might be
worth briefly addressing what happens at the final moment of the clip. That is to say,
it might be worth outlining a brief phenomenological sketch of the ‘full body
possession’ onstage. As with the example of the anthropic limb, there is actually a
clinical condition that corresponds to this situation. Until recently, it was known as
‘multiple personality disorder’, but now it seems that ‘dissociative identity disorder’ is
the preferred name. Personally, I am more comfortable with the latter label, as
construing the condition as ‘multiple personalities inhabiting the same body’ seems to
run counter to many of my claims regarding the concept of the mind. If we deny that
there is a ‘ghost in the machine’, then we must deny that there could be more than one
ghost in the machine. In addition to that, I think there is a problem of construing
137 It could perhaps be understood as the opposite to a phantom limb. Whereas with phantom limbs people report
feeling it - and sometimes even report being able to control it - despite it being no longer there. By contrast, the
alien hand is experienced as beyond the control of the patient. It ostensibly pursues its own projects and
sometimes even violently attacks the patient.
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identity in such a reified manner - it is possible to state ‘I have a strong (or almost any
other adjective) personality’, but this is a misleading picture of what is at issue. My
identity is what I am not some thing that I have, and we quickly find ourselves
entangled in conceptual knots if we think otherwise. In my view, understanding
Dissociable Identity requires that we return to the idea of the self as ‘the centre of
narrative gravity’. In principle, if there is more than one narrative then there could be
more than one self. Obviously, I do not deny that these selves are embodied, but the
self is not embodied in the way that a driver is in a car or a crew is in a ship. Rather,
the self is socially constructed through narrativistic engagement with the world. The
body is a necessary - but not sufficient - condition of such engagement.
7.1.2 Dissociative Identity Disorder
A number of films have used Dissociable Identity Disorder as a plot device, perhaps
the most obvious example being Fight Club. However, I would like to look at the 2000
film Me, Myself and Irene because often it presents the condition as a bodily problem
- like Fight Club, there are scenes in which the two personalities fight using the same
body. Although in many regards the film is rather unremarkable,138 it uses the
astonishing physicality of Jim Carrey to great affect. In the following scene, Charlie
and Hank, the two personalities of Carrey’s character, have a fight in a car.139
Charlie/Hank are driving
Charlie - You are a sick pup.
Hank - Yeah, well, it takes one to know one
Hank opens the car door.
Charlie - What are you doing? Hank!
Hank uses the right hand to bang Charlie's head against the steering wheel.
Charlie - Hank!
Hank - Ever been bitch-slapped?
Hank slaps Charlie’s face.
138 As a number of critics have noted, many of the jokes are rather tired and I would suggest that the condition is
treated rather glibly - almost to the point of being offensive. Regardless, it is a good case study for exemplifying the
phenomenon at issue.
139 See DVD Appendix 4, Clip 2 - ‘Me, Myself and Irene’
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Charlie - I'm going to kill you, I swear to god!
Hank punches Charlie in the face and grabs him by the collar.
Hank - Arrivederci, dead-wood.
Charlie - No!!!
He tumbles out of the car. Cut to Irene evading a policeman on the train.
We return to Hank who jumps back into the car. He looks behind him satisfied. Then
he sees himself (or rather Charlie) in the mirror.
Hank - What the hell are you still doing here?
Charlie - You can't just throw me away, Hank, we are in this together.
In §6.3.2, I claimed that our most fundamental understanding of other Dasein is as a
locus of projects. I assume that people undertake certain projects and have certain
‘self-interpretations’ that guide and inform those projects. All this is constitutively
narrativistic - their projects are influenced by situations that they have found
themselves in and ambitions that they have for the future. Moreover, I claimed that it
is only when someone is doing something truly extraordinary that this assumption is
insufficient. The case of Charlie’s fight with Hank is one of those outliers that requires
further explanation.
Daniel Dennett claims that ‘if we could see what it would be like for two (or more)
selves to vie for control of a single body, we could see better what a self really is’.
(Dennett 1993:419) And although he looks at the clinical disorder rather than Carrey’s
less-than-nuanced portrayal of it, he does so to draw out the same claim that I am
making. In short, the self is created through the narrative that we weave with our
lives. If the self is ‘the centre of narrative gravity’, then there is no reason to think that
one self is the maximum per individual, and there is some indication from certain
clinical conditions that multiple narratives can give rise to ‘multiple selves’.140
Drawing on the work that he has done with sufferers of Dissociative Identity Disorder,
Dennett states that:
140 I would also suggest that one is not the minimum, either. In some conditions characterised by profound deficits
in interpersonal understanding, such as very severe autism, I suspect that this would result in little to no selfformation. Although I don’t have much scope to explore this idea here, Daniel Hutto’s work has influenced me a lot
in this regard, so I would recommend that the interested reader seek out his work on this subject.
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These children have often been kept in such extraordinarily terrifying and
confusing circumstances that I am more amazed that they survive
psychologically at all than I am that they preserve themselves by a desperate
redrawing of their boundaries. What they do, when confronted with
overwhelming conflict and pain, is this: They “leave”. They create a boundary so
that the horror doesn’t happen to them; it either happens to no one or to some
other self, better able to sustain its organization under such an onslaught - at
least that’s what they say they did, as best as they recall. (Dennett 1991:420)
Two things are remarkable in this passage; first, that Dennett is forced by language
towards an essentialism that he is trying to undermine. In his view (and I agree with
him), there is no essential ‘self’ that stands above everything and does the dividing,
yet language forces us towards that sort of postulation.141 Second, that this account
essentially takes the form of a narrative. This resonates with my main claim in §6.3.2,
that all interpersonal understanding is narrativistic - the only difference between the
ordinary cases and the extraordinary ones is that the latter are usually understood
through an explicit linguistic narrative. What makes the case of Charlie/Hank
extraordinary is that it goes against our assumption that every body ‘has’ one self, and
that all behaviour will be intelligible when cast in the light of that person’s selfinterpretations. If there is more than one self, then this simply won’t be the case there might be a deep conflict between the projects that different selves want to
pursue, with the result being a general unpredictability.
Summarising the main point here is difficult without instrumentalising the body - it is
tempting to say that ‘there is usually one self per body but not always’, but this makes
us think that the body is like a vessel ‘inhabited’ by a passenger. This is simply a
misleading picture. Dasein is, of course, embodied and it comports itself concernfully
towards the world. Usually when it does this it constructs a moderately cohesive
narrative with its life. (I say ‘moderately cohesive’ because I want to resist the over-
141 In my view, everyday language is almost hopelessly tied to metaphysical assumptions. I am broadly
sympathetic with the projects of Ryle and Wittgenstein, who saw the task of philosophy to untangle the knots in
understanding caused by language. However, I suspect Heidegger’s approach of coining neologisms allowed him to
go further in this task, albeit at the expense of clarity of expression.
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inflated view of some of the narrativistic Heideggereans.)142 In my view, this
moderately cohesive narrative produces the self - if there is no cohesion then there
will be no self, but if there is more than one narrative then more than one self is
created. Each of these selves will have projects that matter to them and, it seems
likely, some of those projects will diverge or clash with those of others. Most of us can
avoid those whose projects clash violently with ours by putting distance between us
(although, of course, not always). The point that the fight between Charlie and Hank
demonstrates is that they can’t avoid each other - they are ‘in it together’.
At this point I want to move away from Dissociative Identity Disorder and return to
the three modes of ‘unreadiness-to-hand’ that I identified regarding the object failure
in §4.2. As we will see, there is some similarity between the two phenomena, but also
a notable distinctiveness. Ultimately, it is the areas in which the bodily failure is
distinct that I want to focus my interest, and as such that will be the main terrain
covered in the rest of this chapter.
7.2 Conspicuousness, Obstinateness and Obtrusiveness
In §4.2 of this thesis, I outlined three different modes of unreadiness-to-hand:
conspicuousness (malfunction), obstinateness (temporary breakdown) and
obtrusiveness (permanent breakdown). I suggested that such a distinction is useful
for understanding the equipmental breakdown one finds in physical comedy. Each of
these three modes are distinguished in terms of what they disclose and Dasein’s
‘stance’ towards the failure.
I suggested that in cases of malfunction what is disclosed is the problematic feature of
the object (e.g. its instability or weight) and usually The Tramp would respond by
simply picking himself up and returning to the task. Clearly there is an analogous case
to be made with the bodily failure – if I have a momentary ‘dead leg’ when I try to get
142 Guignon, for example, seems committed to the view that our life narratives are more cohesive than actually
they are. At very least, my life is substantially more episodic and slapdash than he claims it is - or at least than he
claims it ought to be.
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up from the chair, I might fall over. In this case, I become aware of the leg as a ‘thing’
that thwarts my project but I recover fairly promptly and continue with my projects.
However, we must not assume that all cases are as clear-cut as this. My suggestion in
§3.1 was that our embodiment is characterised by a plasticity that allows for the
incorporation of the equipment into the body schema. Because of this, I would
suggest there is often an ambiguity regarding whether something is an example of
equipmental breakdown or a bodily one. For example, there is a clip on YouTube of
Michael Gove, the British Secretary of State for Education, falling over.143 As with the
previous example, he quickly picks himself up and continues walking. Although he
looks behind him at the point where he slipped, it is not clear that there was a
problem with the pavement or an object that caused it. Nonetheless, if we assume that
the pavement was particularly slippery, this still raises a question as to whether the
fall was largely a consequence of poor grip on his shoes or a more general lack of coordination. I would suggest that this is not a simple either/or, precisely because of the
very plasticity I outlined previously – for the most part, one’s shoes become part of
one’s body schema. As such, it is better to understand Gove’s fall as a failure in
general bodily intelligence. As I touched on in §2.5, Noël Carroll suggests that the
main theme of The General is this bodily intelligence – usually failure in it, but
sometimes an extraordinary success.
Keaton arguably endeavored to disclose the intelligence of concrete bodily
operations by, on the one hand, staging gags in which the Keaton character takes
a tumble or otherwise fails to achieve his aims exactly because of his stupendous
lack of bodily intelligence; or, on the other hand, by exhibiting feats of physical
ingenuity that take the audience’s breath away. Keaton underscores bodily
intelligence as a human norm by subtracting it from those situations where his
character fares badly in his attempts to influence the physical world and by
superadding it on those occasions where the character has the material world do
his bidding. (Carroll 2009:5-6)
As Carroll states, these failures serve to ‘underscore bodily intelligence as a human
norm’ – we understand how fundamental it is in those moments of failure. Carroll
143
See ‘DVD Appendix 4, Clip 3 – ‘Michael Gove Falls Over’
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elucidates this phenomenon so thoroughly that I fear that there is very little I can add
to his analysis. Instead, I want to focus on those failures that Dreyfus calls
‘breakdowns’ – which can either be temporary or permanent.
Often, I would suggest, the complex interplay between equipment and biolimb is most
clearly seen in moment of these failures. For example, I am severely short-sighted. In
order to read a passage of text without my spectacles, I have to hold the book roughly
an inch from my nose, and at that distance my eyes are unable to work together to
focus so I have to close one eye to read. It is highly unlikely that my vision will
improve, so it could perhaps be described as a ‘permanent breakdown’. But the fact
that I have a pair of spectacles means that it is not an impairment that impacts upon
on my daily life. When they break, or I lose them, I am suddenly aware of how integral
they are to me going about my business – if I can’t repair them promptly then most of
my projects will have to go on hold until I find a replacement pair. (Whether this
constitutes a ‘temporary breakdown’ or a ‘permanent breakdown’ really depends on
how constructive my ‘deliberation is’).
Initially this sort of breakdown seems disanalogous to, for example, Basil Fawlty’s car
failing to start. It could be argued that the spectacles’ dysfunction discloses my own
impairment. However, at the heart of Basil’s frustration is the fact that he is unable to
get to the restaurant in time on his ‘own steam’ – without the help of this equipment.
In both cases, our factical limits are at issue – Basil can’t run at the same rate as a car
whilst carrying a meal, and I can’t see very well. The point here is simply an inherent
ambiguity within the phenomenon. Often the role of our equipment is to overcome a
factical limitation of our bodies – when they break often both the equipmental totality
and the facticities in question are revealed as imbricated.
Regarding one’s ‘stance’ to the breakdown, I think both of the other stances I noted in
§4.2 regarding the equipmental breakdown are found in cases of physical impairment.
In §4.2.3, I used the example of Basil Fawlty to demonstrate that sometimes one
responds to the permanent breakdown with ‘impotent fury’, and the duality of
meaning is not lost on me now. Whilst there are almost innumerable stand-up comics
who have material about being unable to achieve an erection, one response to this
impotence that matches Basil Fawlty’s in terms of fury is that of Simon in the British
teen sitcom, The Inbetweeners. In series 3 episode 4, A Trip to Warwick, Simon
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chastises his genitals with the line, ‘Why won't you start?! Every time I don't want
one, it's there and the one time that I actually need it - nothing!’ Although one could
delve much further into the semiotics of impotence (and the gendered normativity
that it implies) that is not something I intend to do here. Rather I want to focus on
the other stance to the breakdown, the one noted by Dreyfus and Heidegger ‘helplessly standing before’ the problem. This stance to physical impairment is often
found in filmic and theatrical representations of disability, but those representations
are rarely comic. Swain & French, and other disability theorists, have criticized these
representations because they construct and reinforce the ‘personal tragedy view’ of
disability. In the ‘personal tragedy view’ of disability:
The disabled person’s problems are perceived to result from impairment rather
than the failure of society to meet that person’s needs in terms of appropriate
human help, accessibility and inclusion…Disabled people are subjected to many
disabling expectations, for example, to be ‘independent’, ‘normal’, ‘to adjust’ and
‘accept’ their situation. It is these expectations that can cause unhappiness:
rarely the impairment itself. (Swain & French 2004:34)
Importantly, though, the authors do not deny the reality of this as a phenomenon –
they simply argue that it is not a desirable one. This is an important issue that I will
discuss further later on in the chapter, but I thought it was important to set out the
groundwork for such a discussion now. As we will see as the chapter progresses, the
phenomenon of physical impairment is a very complex one with an important social
and political aspect. However, I think in order to adequately address those aspects we
must begin by looking at the existential dimension of the phenomenon. In the next
section I will look at the interplay between impairment and temporality, which I will
suggest grounds the physical impairment as an ontological phenomenon – thereby
allowing it to operate in a similar way to being-towards-death.
7.3 Physical Impairment and Temporal Phenomenology
7.3.1 Temporal Incongruity in Comedy
It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of the important place that time has in the
portrait of Dasein that I have been drawing out throughout this thesis. Temporality is
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constitutive of Dasein - to use Heidegger’s terms, Dasein is a ‘thrown projection’. We
are all thrown into a world and project forwards into the future. As we have seen in
the previous chapter, time structures all of our projects. Heidegger makes this point
succinctly in the following passage.
In most everyday things we do and have done to us, human life is geared
towards time. It is inherently ordered by time. There is a time for work, meals,
recreation and diversion. The ordering of time takes a fixed and public form in
calendars, timetables, class schedules, curfews, and the eight-hour work day.
Events occuring in the world around us and the processes of the natural world
are ‘in time’. (Heidegger 2011:11)
It is also worth noting that often we measure space temporally - for example, we
might say that the supermarket is ‘15 minutes away’. Such claims are normative essentially we mean that most people take fifteen minutes to walk from campus to the
supermarket. As Carel explains, it might not be fifteen minutes for the impaired
person. ‘As her movements slow down, the time difference between herself and others
become evident. She needs to translate healthy time...into her own, more isolated
tempo.’ (Carel 2008:85)144 In order to address everyday examples of the contrast
between ‘healthy time’ and the ‘isolated tempo’ in popular comedy, I want to look at
the following scene from Series 1, Episode 4 of Phoenix Nights. In this scene, the
paraplegic character Brian Potter is leading his new girlfriend, Beverley, upstairs to
his bedroom.145
Brian, in a stairlift, slowly ascends the stairs, coming into shot. Eventually we see
that he is holding hands with Beverley.
Brian - It won’t be long now.
Brian, in the stairlift, awkwardly navigates the corner of the stairs.
Brian - Just you wait.
Beverley smiles meekly.
144 Another interesting area for exploration - and one I would like to explore as part of a future project - is the effect
that certain psychological conditions have on temporal phenomenology. For example, there is now empirical
evidence to suggest that clinical depression produces a slower, isolated tempo. Unfortunately this falls outside of
the scope of this thesis.
145 See DVD Appendix 4, Clip 4 - ‘Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights’
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Brian - The things I’m gonna do to you.
As Brian slowly goes towards the camera and then blocks the view.
This scene seems to last for ages as the excited ascent of two lovers to the bedroom is
drawn out to almost half a minute of uncomfortable smiles and ineffectual dirty talk.
The incongruity here seems to be precisely the aforementioned gap between ‘healthy
time’ and the ‘isolated tempo’ of an impaired character. The encounter between them
is awkward, but ultimately rather endearing as Beverley affectionately follows him up
the stairs at his pace, without so much of a glimmer of frustration.
The same cannot be said for the next clip from Mr. Bean in Room 426, in which Mr.
Bean fumes with frustration as he gets stuck behind an elderly person slowly
descending a hotel staircase.146
Mr. Bean arrives at the lift, notices an ‘out of order’ sign on it and then goes towards
the stairs. After cleaning out his ear with his little finger, Bean walks down the stairs
to find an elderly lady in the way. He pauses. He tries to figure out a way around her moving from left to right frustratedly. He looks down and sees how far there is to go.
He mimes lifting her hand off the rail and then makes an expression of comic
exasperation. He then mimes stabbing the lady (accompanied by the infamous Psycho
soundtrack). Mr Bean runs across the corridor and down a different set of stairs,
hoping to shortcut past the lady. He finds himself still stuck in front of the elderly
lady. He mimes pushing her down the stairs, then he hears the voices of other people
and stops. Once they pass, he continues fuming silently behind the lady. He peers
down. Cut to a shot of the lady’s feet. Bean’s arm comes into shot - he’s climbing
across the side of the bannister. He triumphantly climbs back up in front of the old
lady. He turns forward to find an elderly gentleman in front of him. He is now stuck
between the lady and gentleman. His frustration builds. Finally, with resignation he
slowly plods along behind the gentleman, taking one slow step at a time.
Mr. Bean seems to raise the expression of frustration almost to the level of an art
when confronted with this otherwise rather banal example of temporal incongruity. I
146
See DVD Appendix 4, Clip 5 - ‘Mr. Bean’
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suspect most of us have, at some point, been stuck behind an elderly person on the
street but we would probably have discovered that if we were in a hurry and asked
politely the person is happy to move out of our way. We can imagine a number of
other everyday examples of temporal incongruity, such as the slow elderly checkout
assistant at the local supermarket, or an older lollipop lady making us late for an
important meeting. The main point I am trying to press is that alongside the shared,
normative ‘healthy time’, we are each engaging with projects with slightly different
temporal horizons. It is only in incongruous encounters that we really become aware
of this fact - if someone is slowing us down, or getting in the way as we try to descend
the stairs. This idea contrasts quite strikingly with ‘clock time’, which moves at a
steady pace regardless of what one is doing.
Although this ‘temporal incongruity’ is an interesting trope within comedy, I think it
is worth reminding ourselves of the fundamental truth that underlies it. Specifically,
that we are all finite, and even if we are in the small window of ‘optimal health’ right
now, we will very soon deviate from it. In this way ‘healthy time’, much like many of
the other norms around what one ‘ought to be able to do with one’s bodies’, points to
an almost completely unattainable norm. Moreover, in the next section I will suggest
that the inevitability of bodily breakdown grounds our temporal phenomenology in a
fundamental way and allows for an understanding of physical impairment as an
ontological phenomenon.
7.3.2 Impairment, Entropy and Temporality
Many Heideggereans (including my supervisor, Tony Fisher) would maintain that
bodily impairment is purely an ontic phenomenon that can be explained exclusively in
terms of Dasein’s facticity. Whilst this reading of impairment is often correct, I want
to claim that physical impairment is sometimes an ontological phenomenon - one
which grounds Dasein as ‘thrown projection’. In order to make the case for this
position I need to draw out an aspect of temporality that has been tacitly assumed
throughout this thesis. Specifically, what is known within the philosophy of time as
‘time’s arrow’. Jill North summarises the problem of time’s arrow in the following
quotation.
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Our everyday experience is largely of physical processes that occur in only one
direction of time. A warm cup of coffee, left on its own in a cooler room, will cool
down during the day, not grow gradually warmer…A popsicle stick left out on
the table melts into a hopeless mess; the hopeless mess wont congeal back into
the original popsicle. While we would be shocked to see the temporally reversed
processes, the familiar ones are so familiar that they hardly seem worth
mentioning. But there is a problem lurking. The problem is that the physical
laws governing particles of these systems are symmetric in time. These laws
allow for the time reversed processes we never see, and don’t seem capable of
explaining the asymmetry that we experience. (North 2011:313)
The fact that physics is unable to account for the direction of time is a serious
problem. Indeed, Raymond Tallis (2011) seems to suggest that this marks a limitation
in the explanatory power of science. Personally, I am rather sympathetic to this view
and I think that we are more likely to succeed in explaining the arrow
phenomenologically than physically. Indeed, I am committed to the idea that the
ostensible direction of time is not a feature of physical time but a fundamental
characteristic of our temporal phenomenology. In this thesis I am not going to try to
defend the former point - that the direction of time is not a feature of the physical
universe - but for a compelling argument to this effect I would recommend Huw
Price’s (2011) The Flow of Time. Rather, I want to connect the phenomenological
direction of time to entropy.
Several philosophers and physicist have argued that the best way to explain the flow
of time physically is with the second law of thermodynamics. Simply put, this law
states that closed systems will naturally tend towards entropy - that is, they will move
from a more to a less ordered state. Importantly, this is a statistical law, by which I
mean that it is highly probable that it will move to a less ordered state and the
opposite, although not impossible, is deeply improbable. (It should be noted that it is
so improbable that it is very doubtful that any human being has ever witnessed it.)
The reason that entropy is so probable is simply because there are more permutations
of disorder than of order. There are many more ways that an egg can be splat across
the kitchen than ways it can be contained within a delicate shell. Perhaps, then, the
direction of time arises from a habit of expectation, rather than a fundamental
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physical law? I think that this is part of it and this idea does almost all the explanation
that the physicists require of it. In fact, Huw Price has suggested that any creature
that evolved in a universe in which the arrow of thermodynamics was reversed would
probably understand what we call the past as the future, and what we call the future
as the past.
However, this is all seemingly tangential to the main point of this chapter, so let me
link this idea explicitly to a key point in Heidegger, summarised by Mulhall in the
following passage. ‘Just as Dasein’s existence is projective (projection is not so much
something it does but something that it is), so its existence is futural...We are not
listing the essential features of a present-at-hand entity, but characterising a creature
who lives a life.’ (Mulhall 2008b:165) Within this picture, the direction of time is very
much at issue, and yet it is not clear precisely what grounds this direction.147 In my
view, the direction of this projection is grounded, in part, by the body to which we are
intimately connected. As a natural system, my body is tending towards entropy - put
less delicately, it is slowly falling apart. Of course, as an ‘open’ biological system it
absorbs energy to slow down this descent, but it is still inevitable. In other words,
temporality is built into the structure of Dasein because (as Merleau-Ponty reminds
us) it is through the body that we have a world. As we saw in the case of Seth Brundle
and Gregor Samsa, the degeneration of our physical body results in a deprived
relation to the world, and in §7.3.1 I attempted to demonstrate that the physical
impairment has the potential to change one’s temporal phenomenology - suggesting a
deep interconnectedness between body, world and temporality. This reflects what
Havi Carel (2007b) calls the ‘double meaning of death’ in Being and Time – referring
to temporal finitude and finitude of possibility.
Broadly speaking, the latter refers to the Dreyfusian reading of finitude outlined in
§6.4, whereby in the face of death:
147 In his article Heidegger’s Generative Thesis, Tony Fisher responds to Blattner’s formulation of this critique of
Heidegger’s temporality, and suggests that Heidegger does indeed demonstrate that ‘ordinary time has its genesis
in originary time’. However, although Fisher’s exegesis finds convincing support from the text, I still maintain that
an adequate answer to the problem cannot be found within Being and Time. Ultimately, I believe that this is the
area in which Heidegger’s infamous neglect of the body proves most problematic. In my view, without an account
of the connection between embodiment and temporal phenomenology, like the one Havi Carel gives, one is simply
inadequately equipped to answer this problem.
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[Dasein realizes that it] ‘can never make any possibilities its own. Possibilities
are always there for anyone, part of the public world, and therefore have no
intrinsic meaning for Dasein. The only ownmost possibility is nullity, the
groundlessness of Dasein’s being. So death in Heidegger’s sense, claims Dreyfus,
is not the existentiell or ontic possibility of demise, but the existential
ontological possibility of not having any possibilities. (Carel 2007b: 545)
In my view, it is precisely because the issue is not the ontic possibility of demise but
the ontological possibility of all possibilities falling away that physical impairment can
act in a similar manner, and I hope to demonstrate this in §7.4.2 with the example of
Endgame.
The former – temporal finitude – relates more directly to ‘time’s arrow’, and here is
where my views diverge most forcefully from Heidegger’s. I am simply not convinced
that we can understand the directionality of time without the recourse to its
connection with the physical body. In her book, Illness, Carel argues convincingly that
physical impairment inaugurates a change in one’s temporal phenomenology, and I
tried to support my conviction that she is right with examples in §7.3.1. Moreover,
there is substantial empirical evidence that this is the case, and that a number of
impairments have a marked influence on one’s temporal phenomenology148 –
although often the finding is conceptualized in terms of ‘time perception’, erroneously
suggesting that time is part of ‘objective reality’ and the difference is simply how it is
perceived.149 This suggests to me that our bodies have a crucial role to play in
understanding the directionality of our ‘thrown projection’.
Let us take up Huw Price’s suggestion and imagine that there are Daseinal creatures
that evolved in another part of the universe (or a different universe) in which arrow of
thermodynamics ‘points’ in the opposite direction as it does in ours. All the physical
processes on which their bodies depend will operate ‘the other way round’ – in fact,
the evolution that, as a species, they went through would have happened ‘the other
way round’ from us too. If we take seriously, as I do, the notion that the direction of
See, for example, Claudia Hammond’s book Time Warped.
It is strange that there is this assumption within science, given the implications of relativity. Strictly speaking,
although ‘healthy time’ and ‘clock time’ express shared norms they are both relative. The latter in a physical sense
and the former in a socio-biological sense.
148
149
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time is not a feature of the physical universe but a fundamental aspect of our temporal
phenomenology then there is simply no sense in which either we or they are
‘perceiving time correctly’. We simply project differently from each other.150
Now, when Carel talks of ‘temporal finitude’ in Heidegger, she is referring to the fact
that Dasein is projecting towards death, but it is important to note that here ‘death’
does not refer to an ‘event’ that happens at the end of our life (what he calls demise).
As Heidegger puts it, Dasein ‘does not have an end at which it just stops, it exists
finitely.’ (Heidegger 1996:378) Or, put another way, ‘In the same way that death was
not a possibility in the ordinary sense of the word, but a possibility of being unable to
take up any possibility, Dasein’s end is not a possibility waiting to be realized, but an
ontological condition underlying Dasein’s temporal structure.’ (Carel 2007b: 548) So,
we needn’t imagine that ‘being-towards-death’ is an explicit relation to an imminent
demise (such as the convict on death row, or the terminally ill patient, might
encounter).
Nonetheless, I would suggest that the temporal structure of all projection – including
the case of explicit relation to demise – is grounded in the entropic nature of our
bodies, and that we understand our finitude most acutely in moments in which we are
pressed firmly against it. Just as receiving a poor prognosis from the doctor might
cause a level of reflexivity, and act as a catalyst for an authentic relation to one’s
finitude, I believe that an experience of physical impairment can do the same.151
In short, it is my suggestion that the body is the locus of the interconnection between
‘finitude of possibilities’ and ‘temporal finitude’ – the latter reflected in the entropic
biological decline with which we constantly live, and the former most clearly seen in
the ‘falling away of possibilities’ that accompanies facing up to that fact. In my view,
both of these aspects are at play in Endgame, so I will continue to draw out the case
for this position by focusing on at this play in particular.
150 If we were to meet such individuals, I’m not sure to what extent our worldviews would be commensurable – I
suspect not at all. However, a similar idea is explored in an S03E01 of the comedy Red Dwarf, (BBC Productions
1989) in which the crew visits a temporally reversed world with rather amusing results.
151 It is worth noting that I’m not claiming that either is, on its own, a sufficient condition for authenticity. Both the
dying person and the impaired one can be either authentic or inauthentic. However, I suspect that it’s easier to fall
into inauthenticity when you are in optimum health.
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7.4 Bodily Impairment in Beckett’s Endgame
7.4.1 Endgame, Impairment and Anxiety
Each of the four characters in Endgame is in some way impaired - Hamm is blind and
unable to walk. Clov has bad legs and is unable to sit. Nagg and Nell have both lost
their legs and, as a result, live in ashbins. This inventory of bodily impairments adds
to the bleakness of the world into which they are trapped. Importantly, I would
suggest that their degeneration is the primary way through which the passage of time
is marked.152 As Laura Salisbury argues:
[Within Endgame] time's passage can…be measured by the entropic decline of
Clov's progressive stiffness, Nell's death and Nagg's retreat - markers that
differentiate 'that bloody awful day' from 'this bloody awful day' (113). For
despite Clov's statement that there is 'no more nature', Hamm asserts that 'we
breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!' (97).
Entropy is increasing and time moves inexorably forwards. (Salisbury 2012:124).
In this way, I would suggest that within Endgame we find a concrete example of the
connection of the entropic decline of our bodies and the possibility towards which we
are all projecting – death. Just as the fact that we will all die is an inescapable
certainty, so too is this decline. As Hamm says, ‘with prophetic relish’:
One day you’ll be blind, like me. You’ll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the
dark, for ever, like me. [Pause.] One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit
down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and
have something to eat. But you won’t get up. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat
down, but since I have I’ll sit on a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something
to eat. But you won’t get up and you won’t get anything to eat. [Pause.] You’ll
look at the wall for a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a
little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open
them again there’ll be no wall any more. (Beckett 2006:109)
Steven Connor calls Endgame ‘the most uncompromising representation in Beckett’s work of repetition allied
to entropic running down’. (Connor 1988:122)
152
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This description of a slow degeneration of faculties was directed to Clov but it is
equally applicable to all of us. It is telling that Clov’s retort is that he cannot sit down,
so his degeneration won’t happen quite like that, but he never denies its inevitability.
Hopefully it is clear how this might relate to the discussion in §6.5.2 of Seth Brundle
and what Cronenberg calls the ‘disease of being finite’. Like Seth, Hamm never stops
being in the world, but the failure of his body places factical limits upon what he is
able to do. Cronenberg explicitly claims that this ‘disease’ is a universal human
condition and I am inclined to agree with him – moreover, I think the double
meaning of ‘disease’ is indicative. We can equally understand this phenomenon as a
dis-ease, or anxiety. In my view, what the dark humour of both Endgame and The Fly
reflect is the anxiety that usually accompanies the breakdown of the physical body.
Now it is perhaps best to elucidate what, precisely, this anxiety entails and how it
differs from ‘fear’. Consider the following passage from Beckett’s notebook, written in
1936, translated from the German.
[It is] better to be afraid of something than of nothing. In the first case only a
part, in the second the whole is threatened, not to mention the monstrous
quality which inseparably belongs to the incomprehensible, one could even say
the boundless. When such an anxiety [Angst] begins to grow a reason [Grund]
must quickly be found, as no-one has the ability to live with it in its utter
absence of reason [Grundlosigkeit] (Beckett in Smith 2010:192)
Here we can see a marked similarity between Beckett’s notion of anxiety and
Heidegger’s. In both cases, whereas fear is about something specific – for example, a
spider or the possibility of falling off the roof – anxiety is about our very being in the
world. According to both of them, a common way of coping with this anxiety is to
transform it into fear of something ‘out there’ and thereby make it something
resolvable. When we face up to this anxiety what is disclosed to us is this
aforementioned ‘groundlessness’. I think there is a strong case to be made that this is
what Beckett does, or at least what he attempts to do, in Endgame. Almost a year
later, in a letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett wrote ‘to bore one hole after another in
[language], until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep
through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.’ (Beckett in Smith
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2010:195) In the next section, I will try to address what precisely it is that ‘lurks
behind’ language and everyday intelligibility, although it is something that I have
touched on previously. In doing so, I will draw out a position in response to Adorno’s
reading of Beckett on one hand and Cavell’s reading on the other.
7.4.2 Endgame and the Question of Meaning
Let us begin with a quote, perhaps my favourite from the play – or at least the one
that makes me laugh most consistently. Here we find Nagg recounting a story that
takes place in a tailor’s shop.
‘In six days, do you hear me, in six days. God made the world. Yes Sir, no less
Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of
trousers in three months!’ [Tailors voice, scandalized] ‘But my dear Sir, my dear
Sir, look - [disdainful gesture, disgustedly] - at the world - [pause] and look [loving gesture, proudly] - at my TROUSERS’ (Beckett 2006:102-3)
What this tale brings out forcefully is that if there is a God then perhaps he could have
spent a little longer making the world. Six days would have been very impressive had
the world not turned out so poorly. The key word here is ‘if’ - as Hamm later
concludes, ‘the bastard...doesn’t exist!’ The question that has plagued both
contemporary philosophy and Beckett scholarship is ‘how can there be meaning
without God?’ Put another way, if there is no God, does it follow that everything is
meaningless? Adorno claims that Beckett’s reply to this question is a resounding ‘yes’.
On Adorno’s reading, Beckett takes meaninglessness and absurdity as his starting
point, but unlike the existentialists does not try to make said absurdity itself into a
meaning.
What becomes of the absurd, after the characters of the meaning of existence
have been torn down, is no longer a universal - the absurd would then be yet
again an idea - but only pathetic details which ridicule conceptuality, a stratum
of utensils as in an emergency refuge: ice boxes, lameness, blindness and
unappetizing bodily functions. Everything awaits evacuation. (Adorno 1982:128)
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It is important to note the emphasis that Adorno places on the bodily features within
his taxonomy of ‘pathetic details’ (this is the main area of my interest in this chapter
and we will return to them shortly), but for the moment let’s consider the other
artifactual ones. As Critchley states whilst elucidating Adorno’s argument, ‘Beckett
returns us to the condition of particular objects, to their materiality, to their
extraordinary ordinariness: the gaff, the handkerchief, the toy dog, the sheet, the pap,
the pain-killer’. (Critchley 2004:175) In my view, Beckett’s fascination with the very
everydayness of objects provides an important link between his work and Chaplin’s
fascination with objects.153 We saw in chapter 4 how these most banal objects form a
referential totality - a structure of taken-for-granted meaning. Even when they are
being used incorrectly - that is to say, in a transgressive manner, such as with the boot
in The Gold Rush - our doing so is only possible because of this shared tissue of public
significance. I have been claiming throughout this thesis that concrete projects and
practical involvement with things are an essential component of our being-in-theworld. One cannot address the issue of meaning without addressing practical
involvement. Moreover, one should always keep in mind that the usage of words is a
practical activity that, like any practical activity, relies on a shared tissue of practical
involvement to be meaningful. We are reminded of this fact in the following exchange
between Hamm and Clov.
Hamm: Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!
Clov: [Violently] That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful
day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me
others. Or let me be silent. (Beckett 2006:113)
So, in this way, we are reminded that language is a worldly practice that the child
learns from others, most notably its caregiver (perhaps not the best word for Hamm’s
relationship to Clov!). The meaning of a word is simply its usage in a particular
‘language-game’. Indeed, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of Dreyfus’ reading
of Heidegger, which we touched on in the previous chapter. According to him, ‘what
gets covered up in the everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility, as the
I have read in several places, including Salisbury (2012), that Chaplin was Beckett’s first choice to play the lead
role in Film. Even if this is apocryphal, as it might well be, it is indicative that he eventually settled on Keaton.
153
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tradition always held; it is that the ultimate ‘ground’ of intelligibility is simply shared
practices’. (Dreyfus 1997:157)
In my view, it is precisely this point that is being worked through in Endgame. It is
easy to overlook this point when we are going about our business - pressing into our
projects with the utmost concern. What I am doing at the moment, and what one does
generally, seems to make intrinsic sense. According to Heidegger, anxiety in the face
of death exposes Dasein to the fundamental groundlessness of this ‘sense’. In my view
the triumph of Endgame is that it induces the same anxiety in the audience - we see
that the characters have no intrinsic meaning to cling to: Just handkerchiefs, toy-dogs
and pap. These banal objects, what one ought to do with them and when, are the only
things that fix meaning and intelligibility. That is the point. Because of this, meaning
and worldhood is always there - and always plenitude - no matter how much privation
one finds. As Connor puts it, ‘the paradox of Beckett’s writing is that, while he
continues to try, or feint to try, to detach his characters from ‘the world’, or to limn
various forms of ‘little world’ against the ‘big world’ of the polis, a copular form of
being-there is always necessary for him.’ (Connor 2009:138) 154
So, my suggestion is that the experience of watching Endgame exposes the audience
to this existential anxiety – one that Heidegger suggests we only find in the response
to existential death. In contrast to Critchley, I think this also opens up the possibility
of authenticity in the face of one’s finitude. In the next section I will try to defend this
position against Critchley’s reading of Beckett and his critique of authenticity.
7.4.3 Critchley and the ‘Relational’ Nature of Finitude
The world is overfull with meaning and we suffocate under the combined weight
of the various narratives of redemption - whether they are religious, socioeconomic, political, aesthetic or philosophical…What Beckett’s work offers us,
then, is a radical de-creation of the these salvific narratives, a paring down or
154 Interestingly, though, in that essay Connor suggests that Beckett’s characters create an Umwelt, like that of the
animal. Although I acknowledge that the character’s relation to the world is deprived in a sense, as Connor’s essay
implies, it is a factical deprivation rather than an ontological one – this ‘copula form’ of being there is sufficient to
secure their Daseinal status. Instead of comparing them to Heidegger’s lizard on the rock (which is absorbed
within an Umwelt) I think it’s more helpful to draw a parallel between the kind of deprivation suffered by Gregor
Samsa (or Seth Brundle) and that of the characters in Endgame.
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stripping away of the resorts of fable, the determinate negation of social
meaning through the elevation of form, a syntax of weakness, an approach to
meaninglessness as an achievement of the ordinary without the rose-tinted
glasses of redemption, an acknowledgement of the finiteness of the finite and the
limitedness of the human condition. (Critchley 2004:211)
This passage is close to, yet still misses, the point I am getting at when I suggest that
Beckett induces a anxiety which reveals the fundamental groundlessness of the world.
First and foremost, the phrase ‘the overfull with meaning’ seems to bifurcate
‘meaning’ and ‘world’. In my view, following Heidegger, they are intrinsically the
same - there is no world without meaning and there is no meaning without world.
Secondly, I am only ascribing to the notion of ‘meaninglessness as an achievement’
insofar as it is understood as a phenomenon interpreted on the background
intelligibility of the world. Importantly, I suggested that death is not the only theme
pervading Endgame that works in this way - bodily impairment is equally capable of
doing this, and I believe that this is very much at play in Endgame. Indeed, my
suggestion was that an aesthetic representation of impairment, as one finds in
Endgame, can act as a catalyst for authenticity within the audience. Mulhall (2008b)
suggests that Being and Time, as a text, can act as ‘pivot for their readers’ selftransformation, as at once a mirror in which their present inauthenticity is reflected
back to them and as a medium through which they might attain authenticity’.
(Mulhall 2008b:147). In a similar manner, I believe that the experience of witnessing
the characters’ decrepitude in Endgame both reflects our own finitude to us and
opens up the possibility of authenticity. (Even though none of the characters in the
play are, themselves, authentic).
As Butler observes, ‘Beckett is clearly very concerned to get people to stay still. He
blinds and maims them, puts them in sand, jars, wheelchairs, dustbins and mud.’
(Butler 1984:11) In doing so, I would argue, he impairs their ability to ‘be in the
world’. Indeed, Butler observes that because of his impairment Hamm’s ‘projection
into possibilities is largely verbal...and takes the form of storytelling’ (Butler
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1984:15).155 I would like to suggest that the ‘healthy and normal’ body is transparent
and that, much like the equipment that I use, I only really become aware of my body
in its failure. Unlike the broken tool I can’t simply replace my limb and resume the
task at hand. In the case of chronic impairment, the impaired body simply prevents
one from doing certain things. However, it is not a straight dichotomy between the
‘healthy’ body on one hand and the ‘impaired’ body on the other, as we are all slowly
aging and deteriorating. Rather than outlining the specific plight of four impaired
characters, Endgame depicts a universal feature of human existence. Much like the
equipmental breakdown, the bodily impairment can range from minor to severe and
from momentary to permanent, but we all have bodies that are liable to break down at
times. Moreover, at the heart of the impotence that is engendered by the character’s
impairments is the fact that they still relate to the world and each other, but that
relation is a tragically deprived one. In this way, it is an example of relational finitude
that stands in contrast with death, despite Critchley’s claims to the contrary.
At the foundations of Critchley’s critique of Heideggerean authenticity is the issue of
the ‘relational character’ of death. According to Heidegger, my death is constitutively
non-relational - it is characterised by ‘mineness’. Whereas other people can take my
place in the pub football team or the latest play that I’m performing in, no one can die
instead of me. Moreover, it is non-relational in the sense that it draws Dasein back to
itself - it is placed into a relationship with itself through the ‘call of conscience’ that
rips it away from the everydayness of ‘the one’. However, Critchley argues that this is
wrong both normatively and empirically, and argues for ‘the fundamentally
relational character of finitude, namely that death is first and foremost experienced
in a relation to the death or dying of the other and others, in being-with dying in the
caring kind of way and grieving after they are dead.’ (Critchley 2008:144)156 In my
opinion, this misses the main point that Heidegger is trying to get at - when I lose a
loved one, they become a sort of hole in the world that I have to adjust to. Neither
Heidegger nor I deny the gravity of this happening. But when I die that will result in
155 In the place marked by the ellipse the author states, ‘of course, the actual projection is always a mental process
and, as such, verbal’. This remark was parenthetical, and as such it is not clear whether Butler was expressing his
own opinion or his reading of Heidegger. If it is the latter, I would suggest that this indicates a grave
misunderstanding of Heidegger.
156 A similar argument can also be found in Sartre (1956).
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my no longer having a world! That’s the point that Heidegger is driving at - my death
is the breakdown of all possibilities for me.
Nonetheless, I do think Critchley picks up on an important point that is neglected in
Heidegger’s conception, and that is the experience of living with a terminal condition
- or living with someone who has that condition. But unlike my death, which will be a
final, non-relational and irrevocable loss of the world, living with impairment and
disease is constitutively relational. In other words, I deteriorate in the world with
others. This might involve living amongst ‘non-impaired’ others who are able to do
things that I am unable to do, or it might involve encountering social stigma and
prejudice - or, indeed, being cared for by another. But this is only the ontic aspect of
the phenomenon. As I argued in the previous section, I believe that the experience of
physical impairment can be an ontological phenomenon that has the potential to
induce the same anxiety that Heidegger claims we find in the face of death.
In my view, there is a possibility to which I am projecting that is arguably worse than
my death. That is the point at which I will still be in the world - I will still have
ambitions and projects - but my physical body has degenerated to such an extent that
I am simply unable to do them. Frankly, when confronted with a relation to the world
that is as deprived as Nagg’s, for example, death might well be a welcome solution.157
This lies at the very heart of the anxiety that I think is induced by the phenomenon of
physical impairment. This might be an anxiety which has become more prevalent
after Heidegger finished Being and Time, reflective of the fact that increasing life
span has proven easier than decreasing the rate of physical degeneration. There is
now demonstrably a trend, starting with the ‘Baby Boomers’, in which each
subsequent generation can expect to live a larger and larger proportion of their life in
a frail and fragile condition towards the end. On my reading of Endgame, it is anxiety
in the face of this possibility that is induced. Consider the following exchange between
Nagg and Nell.
Nell: What is it, my pet? [Pause.] Time for love?
Nagg: Were you asleep?
I would suggest that authenticity and suicide (including assisted suicide) are perfectly compatible. Indeed, as I
stated previously, Dasein is unique in being able to choose life or death.
157
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Nell: Oh no!
Nagg: Kiss me.
Nell: We can’t.
Nagg: Try.
[Their heads strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall apart again.]
Nell: Why this farce, day after day?
[Pause.]
Nagg: I’ve lost me tooth.
Nell: When?
Nagg: I had it yesterday!
[They turn painfully towards each other]
Nagg: Can you see me?
Nell: Hardly. And you?
Nagg: What?
Nell: Can you see me?
Nagg: Hardly
Nell: So much the better, so much the better.
Nagg: Don’t say that. [Pause.] Our sight has failed. (Beckett 2006:99)
Later on in the play, Nell seems to have died in her ashbin. However, I would argue
that this scene is more anxiety-inducing than that one, precisely because it is
constituted by a deprived ‘being-with’ - it is relational in both directions. Both parties
try and fail to kiss - to find comfort in each other. Both parties find that they are less
able to see each other, and although they conclude later on that their hearing hasn’t
failed, the ‘our what?’ which directly follows from that statement suggests it’s not the
case. In this way, they are slowly losing each other whilst still having a relationship to
what is lost – a failure in relationality which ultimately throws one back to one’s own
finitude.
The physical impairment can also have the power to shrink the world of the impaired
person. For Hamm it is clear that, despite some curiosity regarding what is happening
outside, the room is his world. In fact, he states this explicitly in the following
passage.
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Hamm: Take me for a little turn. [Clov goes behind the chair and pushes it forward.]
Not too fast! [Clov pushes the chair.] Right around the world! [Clov pushes the chair.]
Hug the walls, then back to the centre again. [Clov pushes the chair.] I was right in
the centre, wasn’t I?
Clov: [Pushing] Yes
Hamm: We’d need a proper wheel-chair. With big wheels. Bicycle wheels! [Pause.]
Are you hugging?
Clov: [Pushing] Yes.
Hamm: [Groping for a wall] It’s a lie! Why do you lie to me?
Clov: [Bearing closer to the wall.] There! There!
Hamm: Stop! [Clov stops chair close to the back wall. Hamm lays his hand against
wall.] Old wall! [Pause.] Beyond is...the other hell. [Pause. Violently.] Closer! Up
against
(Beckett 2006:104, my emphasis)
To be clear, I am not saying that what stands beyond the wall is unimportant. Rather I
would like to suggest that Hamm’s impairment is part of what makes what lies outside
‘the other hell’. After all, Clov is able to leave even though he will most likely starve.
Moreover, I am suggesting that the plight of Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell resonate
with us because we all know that there may be a time when we wont be able to find
comfort in a loved one, or be able to leave the house. Despite the rather extraordinary
backdrop, the characters and situations are almost timelessly familiar. As Cavell
observes, once we take a step back, we see that they are simply a family.
Not just any family perhaps, but then every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way...The old mother and father with no useful functions any more are
among the waste of society, dependent upon a generation they have bred, which
in turn resents them for their uselessness and dependency. (Cavell 1969:117)
In this way, we can see the clear social dimension of Endgame that is often lost
amongst all the claims of universality and ‘resonance with the human condition’. The
reader might suspect that I have been attempting to make exactly the same sorts of
claim, which is why I think it is important to draw this point out. Whilst impairment
is undoubtedly a fundamental part of the human experience, this does not preclude a
distinctly social dimension to the phenomenon (and I doubt very few people would,
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when pressed, argue to the contrary). Given that each character is suffering so
tremendously, I would find it very hard to recommend the anxiety and impotence
engendered by Endgame as a sustained way of life.158 However, as I discussed in §6.4,
this anxiety opens up the possibility for authenticity in the audience. Dreyfus’ reading
of authenticity construes it as a ‘style’ with which one engages with ones projects; one
that ‘manifests my understanding that no specific project can fulfill me or give my life
meaning’. (Dreyfus 1997:323) As I stated in the previous chapter, I am not convinced
that this is a sustainable way to live one’s life. I think that on the Dreyfusian reading
of authenticity, inauthenticity is simply inescapable - we cannot help but proceed with
a conviction that our activities are intrinsically meaningful and immerse ourselves
into our projects with that conviction. In my opinion, we should not view the anxiety
engendered by Endgame as a recommendation for how we should live but rather as a
sobering wake-up call. The achievement of Endgame is that it reveals that underneath
banal, everyday intelligibility there are not any deep truths or ground for that
intelligibility. Only our simple, everyday practices.
7.4.4 Anxiety and Humour
At this point, it might seem like we have ventured very far away from the topic of
humour – after all, it might seem to some readers that there is nothing funny about
the groundlessness mentioned above. Perhaps this is an issue of temperament, but I
personally think that there is – indeed, I would suggest that it lies at the very heart of
the dark humour found in Beckett. Nonetheless, I suspect that it is advisable for me to
briefly outline more explicitly how I believe this idea relates to humour.
In his fascinating article, Absurdity, Incongruity and Laughter, Bob Plant suggests
that humour of the absurd arises from the incommensurability of two positions - the
subjective view from which things of concern seem to be of utmost importance, and
the objective ‘view from nowhere’ in which nothing seems to matter. He suggests that
158 This seems to be the main point at which my position diverges with Critchley’s. As the risk of veering towards
an ad hominem attack, Critchley seems to be encouraging an embrace of impotence from a very privileged
position. I can’t imagine many people living with impairments finding his position particularly palatable. As
Salisbury argues, ‘What kind of ethical stance, particularly an ethics with any relation to politics, is to be found in
the affirmation that material conditions of pain and want in which there is no penicillin, just as in Endgame there
will be no more painkillers, are something to be derided and transcended with a sardonic smile at a universally
shared fate?’ (Salisbury 2012:141)
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this fundamental incongruity lies at the heart of the absurd, and in the face of this
absurdity, laughter is an appropriate response. (As opposed to the defiance that
Camus suggested). Although, following Heidegger, I would suggest that there are deep
problems with the subjective/objective dichotomy; I think this is a fairly strong
account of this kind of humour. To use the example from chapter four, when someone
is immersed in their activities, as Arnold Schwarzenegger was with the practice of
weight-lifting, then it seems to be intrinsically important. But when someone like
Dylan Moran encourages us to look at it from a position of exteriority then the whole
thing seems laughably pointless. If you extrapolate that to what Plant and Nagel call
‘the view from nowhere’ then all our activities seem equally pointless.
A similar thing is happening in Endgame – we go about our business with this sense
that our projects are inherently important and meaningful, but then in the face of this
anxiety we realise that there is no deep ground to intelligibility. What we are left with
are these hollow props and banal routines. The gulf between everyday and
intelligibility and the groundlessness underneath is deeply incongruous, and certain
writers such as Beckett use this incongruity in order to create very dark humour.
Critchley claims that ‘like Hamm we are cursed...by the need for narrative’ (Critchley
2004:212). I think this point is correct, and moreover it lies at the heart of the tension
between the Dreyfusian and Narrativistic accounts of authenticity. In my view, this
tension is essential. As Fisher states, ‘the profound impetus within life to realize itself
in some meaningful whole...in fact arises from out of the very nullity of existence
which...prohibits its accomplishment.’ (Fisher 2010a:263) Put another way, it is
precisely because ultimately there is no ‘ground’ to fix meaning aside from banal
practices that we feel compelled to create meaningful narratives with our lives. As
Fisher suggests, we will never be successful in creating a narrative that produces
‘objective’ meaning, but in my view that doesn’t really matter. The lack of fixed
intrinsic meaning gives us tremendous freedom - we can ‘change the world’. Albeit
with Dreyfus’ caveat that such changes take place on the background of ‘accepted forthe-sake-of-whichs that cannot all be questioned at once because they...must remain
in the background to lend intelligibility to criticism in change’. (Dreyfus 1997:161)
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It is with this in mind that I want to address the work of Francesca Martinez, a
comedian with Cerebral Palsy, who attempts to challenge popular preconceptions
about physical impairment with her comedy and social activism.
7.5 Comedy, Impairment and Narrativistic Authenticity
7.5.1 Contra Critchley
Humour recalls us to the modesty and limitedness of the human condition, a
limitedness that calls not for tragic-heroic affirmation but comic
acknowledgement, not Promethean authenticity but laughable inauthenticity.
Maybe, we have to conclude with Jack Nicholson in the 1997 movie of the same
name, this is as good as it gets. (Critchley 2002:102)
In this quotation, Critchley begins from the same position as me but arrives at a very
different conclusion - he thinks an acknowledgement of our limitedness precludes
authenticity. However, I think it might be worth unpacking what he means when he
claims that ‘this is as good as it gets’. If he means that there is no hope for another
world beyond this one - a heaven or nirvana - then I completely agree with him. But if
he means to say that this world cannot get any better then I have to disagree. I find
this line of thinking particularly troubling regarding the question of physical
impairment because, as the social model of disability suggests, even regarding the
‘brute fact’ of physical impairment we are not powerless victims. We saw in Endgame
how Beckett gives his characters a range of impairments to render them impotent, but
one could argue that the impairment on its own is not enough. Nagg losing his legs
alone did not prevent him from kissing Nell - they were both put in ashbins, probably
by their son, Hamm. The characters are also stuck in a relationship of co-dependency
that decreases the freedom of them all. They are, as Cavell puts it, ‘bound in the circle
of tyranny, the most familiar of family circles’. (Cavell 1969:118) In short, the
impairments on their own are not sufficient to produce the impotence found in
Endgame.
It is worth us recalling the main ideas that we encountered in §3.1 of this thesis. First,
that embodiment is characterised by a plasticity that allows for the incorporation of
the tool. The second is that of the social model of disability. That is, ‘that people with
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accredited or perceived impairments, regardless of cause, are disabled by society’s
failure to accommodate their needs’. (Barnes 2002:5) In dealing with physical
impairment, I would like to suggest that we avoid conceptual slippage between
‘impairment’ and ‘disability’, or even impotence. Sometimes Critchley seems to slip
from one to the other, and I would suggest that such a slippage ignores the social
factors that have the disabling affect. In the last passage from Endgame that we
looked at, Hamm lamented that ‘we’d need a proper wheel-chair. With big wheels.
Bicycle wheels!’ (Beckett 2006:104). Such a lament is, I suspect, familiar to any
impaired people who do not receive the support that they need. Unfortunately, we still
live in a society in which streets are designed for ‘fully-abled’ people with the result
being a marginalisation of people in wheelchairs and with prosthetics. People who
could, if adequately accommodated, live satisfying and rich lives. It is with this idea in
the foreground that I would like to look at the work of Francesca Martinez - actress,
activist and stand-up comedian.
7.5.2 What the F*** is Normal?
In her recent show at the Tricycle Theatre, Francesca Martinez asks the question,
‘what the fuck is normal?’. In this show, Martinez discusses the barriers she has faced
as someone who has Cerebral Palsy (although she prefers the term ‘wobbly’). She
explains the reason for the title of the show in the following excerpt.
Francesca - My show is called What the Fuck is Normal? because...what the fuck is
normal? I have never met a normal person. Have you?...Hello sir...sorry my pointing
is very unhelpful, that was good *Audience laughs*...so, what’s your name?
Andrew - Andrew
Francesca - Andrew? Andrew, hello. Andrew - are you a normal person?
Andrew - I don’t think so.
Francesca - You don’t think so? Have you ever met a normal person?
Andrew - No, I don’t think so…
Francesca - Where are they? Do they exist? This is it. I met a guy the other week, yeah,
and I asked him, ‘what do you think normal means’? And I love this, he said, normal
is a cycle on a washing machine. *Audience Laughs* How great is that? But I think
it’s really sad because I think society tells us this myth of normality, but it doesn’t
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exist. And it really annoys me how society defines people by one single aspect that
differs from the so-called norm. You know, like gay or disabled because surely
everyone differs in one way?
This is not the first time a comedian has tried to challenge the notion of what
constitutes ‘normal’. In fact, a few years earlier I saw a brilliant show by Laurence
Clark - another comedian with Cerebral Palsy - which he cheekily titled The Jim
Davidson Guide to Equality. In this show, he got the audience to raise their hands
and then divided us by identity. First, he asked the women to put their hands down
(around 50%), then asked any gay or bisexual people to put their hands down (around
10% of that figure), then disabled people and various ethnic minority groups followed
suit. By the end, the ‘normal’ people - Jim Davidson’s core demographic - were
demonstrably a tiny fraction of the audience. This is not to deny difference - both
Martinez and Clark openly find humour in their condition - but rather to acknowledge
it and accept it as part of everyday life. I would argue that the whole premise of
Martinez’s show, including its rather provocative title, is an attempt to achieve what
Reid et al. claim is the unique potential of disability humour.
It provides non-disabled audiences an opportunity to learn that the problem is
not the impairment per se, but the attitude and structures that render the
impairment disabling...Comedy is uniquely suited to exposing arbitrary qualities
of thought and suggesting alternative ways of (re)presenting and (re)structuring
reality. (Reid et al. 2006:630)
Martinez is by no means alone as a comedian who attempts to challenge those
attitudes and structures - the authors cite a number of comedians in the US and Clark
stands out as another UK comic who challenges preconceptions surrounding
disability. At the forefront of the preconceptions that need to be challenged - and
most germane to the current chapter - is what Swain and French call the ‘personal
tragedy’ view of disability, which we touched on slightly in §7.2.
On this view, ‘impairment, which is equated with disability, is thought to strike
individuals causing suffering and blighting lives’ (Swain & French 2004:34) A result
of this view is that the tragedy ought to be eradicated or neutralised, with the
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consequence being that the abortion of impaired foetuses is barely challenged. (Swain
& French 2004:34) This is precisely the target of the following excerpt from Martinez,
this time recorded as part of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Podcast and
therefore available on the appendix.159
Francesca - I did a gig to a group of doctors recently and it was really cool because I
could patronise them. *Audience laughs* And, erm. It went really well but
afterwards this woman put her hand up and she said, “look, it’s my job to advise
parents carrying disabled babies on whether or not to have an abortion. And I always
feel that we should reduce the amount of suffering in the world. What do you think?
The room went quiet. Like this. *audience laughs* And I said, “well, if you really
want to reduce suffering in the world maybe you should have aborted bankers, arms
dealers, politicians, the Pope and Rupert fucking Murdoch.” *Audience laughs* Coz
I think, you know, the majority of suffering doesn’t come from having a difference, it
comes from living in a world that is...you know, can’t handle difference. Even if you
eradicate all disabilities at birth, people can still become disabled at any time. Can’t
they? Like look at poor...erm...Nick Clegg. *Audience laughs* So sad. You know,
one day he’s normal...next he’s a baby. *Audience laughs*
Richard - But people do forget that. I mean that’s...because people don’t want to
face...you know, we kinda try to imagine that we’re not getting older and getting more
decrepid, and we are going to be young forever. (Herring 2012)
I think Richard Herring sums up his position quite succinctly when he says later on
that ‘I think the reason that disability frightens people, really, is because if you stop
and think about it, everyone is...you’d think we’d be much more sympathetic to this.’
(Herring 2012) On this point, I agree with him wholeheartedly - again, to use
Cronenberg’s phrase, we all have the disease of being finite. Even if we are currently
in the tiny window of ‘optimum health’, we need to face up to the fact that this is a
small fraction of the several decades that we will live in this world.
It is precisely for this reason that I think Martinez’s comedy strikes one with such
resonance. We saw that Endgame demonstrates this universality, but Critchley
159
See DVD Appendix 4, Clip 6 - ‘Francesca Martinez and Richard Herring’
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suggests that this gives us reason to almost embrace our impotence. He seems to
suggest that facing up to one’s limitedness necessitates inauthenticity, but I think
Martinez’s work looks to contradict that. Her comedy, and the activism that takes up a
large part of her time (although the two are not necessarily separate), is far more
congruent with the narrativistic authenticity we saw in the previous chapter. She has
been thrown into a world with certain factical limitations and certain social
presuppositions, but rather than seeing them as reason for resignation she devotes
herself to campaigning for disability rights and using comedy for advocacy. In her
show she frankly discusses her experiences being bullied in a ‘regular comprehensive
school’, and the fight that her parents went through to get her there. (Rather than a
special needs school). Additionally, she clearly knows what sort of future she would
like to see - one in which impaired people are treated with the same amount of respect
as anyone else. Importantly, she does not think the way to get there is with po-faced
political correctness, but rather she encourages us to laugh at her physical
impairments in the same way as we would our own. In this way, she has a selfinterpretation - as a disability activist - which is constitutive of the overall ‘narrative’
that she is weaving with her life.
However, this opens up a broader question – specifically, the extent to which this is
ultimately undermined by my view that this narrative could never constitute ‘fixed’
intrinsic meaning. Although I’m sure some readers will disagree, I personally don’t
think it does. We have this world and it is here that we actually make a difference - we
can improve the lives of people in the present, and that’s good enough for me. The
main point is that we are all limited, in one way or another, and even those few
individuals at the prime of their physical well-being will before long be struggling to
climb up the stairs, and soon after will be pushing up daisies. This being the case, I
think it is important that we live in a society that is open about that fact and
empowers rather than disables its citizens. In doing so, it will enable us to adapt more
effectively to the challenges of physical impairment.
7.6 On the Prosthetic
7.6.1 Adam Hills and the Unsexy Foot
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As I argued in §3.1 (a point to which I keep returning) embodiment is characterised by
a plasticity that allows one to incorporate objects into the body schema. As such, the
person who has lost a limb such as a leg is sometimes able to compensate for this loss
with a prosthetic. The comedian Adam Hills has lived his whole life with a prosthetic
foot, but he says explicitly that he does not consider himself disabled. When he was
first emerging as a comedian, he was reluctant to discuss the prosthetic, saying that
he wanted to prove himself as a comic before bringing it up. (Scott-Norman 2002)
However, once he was confident that it wasn’t a ‘gimmick’ that he would find limiting,
he introduced it into his material. Hills is explicit that his prosthetic foot does not
prevent him from doing anything that any non-impaired person is able to do. Much of
his material is derived from the strange questions that he gets from other people
regarding what he can and can’t do, such as in the following excerpt in which he
discusses what effect it has on his sex life. 160
Adam - I was at a party once with a group of people and said that I’ve got an artificial
foot and this woman went ‘can you still have sex?’ *Audience laughs* What? Yeah!
*Audience laughs* What does your boyfriend do? *Audience laughs* Does he
have a run-up? *Audience laughs and applauds* And the guy next to her went,
‘So, er, do you take it off to have sex?’ *Audience laughs* And it always gets a bit of
a laugh and then it stops, coz everyone goes, ‘Ha! Do ya?’ *Audience laughs* The
answer is yes, I do. *Audience laughs* But there is no sexy way to remove a leg.
*Audience laughs* I can’t do a strip across the room, lower the lights, unbutton a
shirt, play some music. Does the sound of sexy music, mimes trying to shake off the
leg and then falling over. *Audience laughs and applauds*.
What is notable about this routine is that the very idea that it would prevent him from
having a ‘normal’ sex life is, in itself, laughable, and the trouble of removing the leg in
a sexy manner is treated with a lightness that construes it as a minor inconvenience. It
is perhaps akin to removing a wellington boot elegantly or getting one’s head caught
when taking off a jumper. Again, this not to trivialise the experience of someone living
with an impairment, but rather to see the lighter and universal side of it - we are all
engaged with what Heidegger calls skillful coping and, as we saw in the fourth
160
See DVD Appendix 4, Clip 7 - ‘Adam Hills I’
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chapter, we all have to deal with breakdown situations. In fact, as I have argued
previously, where the tool ends and the body begins is far from clear-cut.
7.6.2 The Broken Tool and the Impaired Body
Hopefully now the reader will have a sense of my position regarding the impaired
body and how it contrasts with the broken equipment, particularly in cases of more
enduring ‘breakdowns’. In chapter four, I argued that objects are for the most part
transparent, as our attention is fixed on the projects with which one is engaged. In
cases of breakdown, what is disclosed is the referential structure surrounding those
projects.
By contrast, bodily impairment, which I characterise as ‘relational finitude’, has the
potential to induce anxiety that makes us realise that underpinning everyday
intelligibility is not some deep truth or ‘ground’, but simply our shared practices.
However, we feel compelled towards constructing meaningful narratives with our
lives - not just in spite of but because of that fact. Put another way, the world is the
source of all intelligibility, and recognising that fact returns us ineluctably to this
world. In doing so, it enables us to decide what sort of world we want it to be.
Following the social model of disability, I have argued that we need to understand
that it is society that disables impaired people, and as such it is equally capable of
emancipating them. We can do that by trying to change social attitudes towards
disability, as Martinez attempts to do, but also through the artefacts that fill our
world. As Adam Hills demonstrates, the prosthetic can enable the impaired person to
live a ‘normal’ life, perhaps even allow them to hide the impairment and ‘fit in’. It is
an open question whether or not such ‘fitting in’ and hiding is desirable, and it seems
that Martinez would disagree that it is. At very least it allows the person with the
impairment to disclose that fact on their own terms, without feeling that it is reduced
to a gimmick or that audience ‘lowers their expectations’ for them. Hills lampoons the
idea that one should lower ones expectations of a performer because of an
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impairment in the following excerpt in which he discusses an encounter that he has
with a heckler.161
Adam - I’ve only been heckled twice when talking about my foot, the best heckles I’ve
ever received. One was in Edinburgh - 2 o’clock in the morning I walked out onstage
to compere this show. This guy was leaning on the front with a pint of beer in his
hand. I just went “Hi, I’m Adam”, and he went “you’re shite!”. *Audience laughs*
Jesus, give me a chance to prove it! *Audience laughs* “I’m from Australia”.
“Australia’s shite!” *Audience laughs* Everything I said for ten minutes - “That’s
shite, you’re all shite. Shite.” Ten minutes in I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got an artificial foot. And
he went, “oh, shite”. *Audience laughs* He got on stage, took the mic and went,
“no, give him a round of applause. That’s brave, that is.” *Audience laughs*
I think Hills’ point, and one that he seems to endorse in interviews, is that most
impaired people don’t want applause ‘for being brave’. They might well be shite. All
that he asks for is a chance to prove it, and if he is then it’s probably right to heckle
him.
7.7 A Final Carelian Thought
Towards the end of her book, Havi Carel discusses the way in which her prognosis
reduces how far into the future she projects - not exceeding the few years she expects
to live. In terms of performance, I think this is an incredibly important component of
the poignancy of any drama that depicts someone coming to terms with his or her
prognosis. However, it is not something that mainstream Hollywood comedy seems
capable of addressing adequately.162 Carel writes about how her own experience of
living with illness has truncated her temporal horizon.
I don’t make plans for the next year or even six months ahead. When people say,
“I’m planning a trip around the world in two years, after my promotion”, I
shudder internally at their hubris. My projects are now modest: a paper, a short
See DVD Appendix 4, Clip 8 - ‘Adam Hills II’
Both Funny People (2009) and Stranger Than Fiction (2006) were shaping up to strong portraits of a person
coming to terms with his death, but unfortunately both of them went for a happy ending.
161
162
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book, a few conferences in the spring, a brief trip to Paris next month. Even they
are in the shadow of substantial conditions: if I am still alive; if I am able to
travel to France by train; if I am not on the waiting list for a transplant. (Carel
2008:126)
Something that I have been trying to press throughout this chapter is that although
each case of impairment has a specificity - Carel has a certain condition, LAM
(lymphangopleiomyomatosis), and has certain projects and self-interpretations that
matter to her - there is also a universality. It is in light of this that I think we can all
take something from her suggestions on how one can live well with illness. The key,
she claims, is to live in the present.
Learning to live in the present with illness is learning to be happy now,
regardless of threats to our future. It is learning to confine memories of past
abilities and fears of the future so that they do not invade the present. It is
learning to delimit them, stop them from shadowing the present. By changing
our attitude to time, we can change the quality of the present, how much we
enjoy living now. (Carel 2008:127)
Once we can appreciate the universality of impairment - that is, once we see that we
are all destined to deteriorate in health, and ultimately we are all going to die, then we
are able to appreciate what Heidegger means by ‘authentic temporality’. We
understand that we are finite, limited creatures and in the light of that we project
ourselves accordingly. It might seem a little harsh to call someone hubristic for
assuming that they will still be able to travel around the world in two years, but the
fact is that none of us have that certainty. In my view, what recognition of this
requires is not despair or any pleading for God to save us from this fate (as Hamm
bluntly remarks, the bastard doesn’t exist). Rather, we should acknowledge that we
only have this life and this world, and organise our affairs accordingly.
7.8 Conclusion
In this chapter we have covered quite a bit of ground, a journey which I hope has been
enriched by building on previous chapters. We started by looking at the anthropic
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limb, which I suggested is best understood in light of the previous discussion of the
animated puppet. The central claim that I made in §7.1 was that both the ‘possessed’
hand is characterised by the performer’s body schema being split and there being two
referential contexts structuring two sets of projects. Furthermore, I suggested that the
case of Dissociative Identity supported my conception, borrowed from Dennett, of the
self as ‘the centre of narrative gravity’. It happens that most Dasein construct only one
narrative with their lives, but there is no reason in principle why that is the maximum.
If there is more than one narrative then there is more than one self.
In §7.2, we briefly returned to the three modes of unreadiness-to-hand, and the extent
to which these are equally present in moments of bodily failure. In §7.3 I suggested
that physical impairment relates to temporal phenomenology in two important ways
– first, that physical impairment has the potential to inaugurate a change in one’s
temporal phenomenology, a potential most clearly seen in moments of ‘temporal
incongruity’. Second, that the entropic nature of our physical bodies ground Dasein as
a thrown projection, which relates to an important aspect of our being-towards-death.
In §7.4 I concentrated on bodily impairment in Endgame. The central claim that I
made in this section was that the bodily impairment, as relational finitude, is as
capable of inducing existential anxiety as death. In my view, what is disclosed in these
moments is that there is no ultimate ground for meaning, simply shared practices.
This, I believe, lies at the heart of Beckett’s fascination with banal, everyday objects.
Moreover, I argued that it is precisely because the world is the source of intelligibility
that we are able to change that world - after all, nothing is fixed - and construct
meaningful narratives with our lives.
In §7.5 I attempted to draw out what one such ‘authentic’ narrativistic selfconstruction might be, specifically focussing on responses to bodily impairment.
Francesca Martinez has devoted much of her adult life to disability activism, using
comedy as an important tool to challenge social attitudes towards impairment.
Following the social model of disability, I argued that it is society that disables
individuals with impairments and, as such, it is equally capable of emancipating
them.
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In §7.6, I addressed the nature of the prosthetic limb and finally, in §7.7, I addressed
Cavel’s description of the living well with illness and suggested that this is very close
to Heidegger’s notion of ‘authentic temporality’. I would suggest that because we all
have the ‘disease of being finite’ it is description from which we all might all learn
something.
In working through this chapter, it is my hope that the threads developed in previous
ones have elucidated the phenomena in question. More than that, I hope that any
loose threads that were lingering at the beginning of this chapter have either been tied
up or, perhaps more exciting, sparked the readers interest in avenues for future
research. It is with the latter hope in mind that we turn to the final, concluding
chapter. In this chapter I will recap over the terrain covered in this thesis, draw out
what I believe are its contributions to new knowledge and then pick out areas for
development and future exploration.
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8. Conclusion
8.1 Summary
In this thesis I set out to use Heideggerean phenomenology to elucidate what I believe
are the hermeneutic conditions of humour. As I made explicit from the outset, a
hermeneutic condition is neither a causal condition nor a sufficient condition of
something being funny. Rather, the claim that I have pursued throughout this thesis
is that it is only on the basis of my being-in-the-world that I am able to make and
comprehend jokes.
The thesis was composed of two parts, a theoretical and phenomenological
component. Part one set out a critical framework and contextualised my claims within
the literature. Part two was comprised of chapters 4-7, in which I drew out a
phenomenology of dysfunctional objects, anthropic objects, anthropic animals and
bodily impairments. It is in the second part that I feel I have made the most original
contribution to new knowledge.
The fourth chapter, a phenomenology of dysfunctional objects, developed Heidegger's
notion that the most fundamental form of understanding is not intellectual theorising
but practical involvement with equipment and projects. I argued that it is only in
moments of breakdown and equipmental transgression, such as those found in the
comedy of Chaplin, that the structure underpinning this everyday understanding is
disclosed to us. Moreover, I attempted to elucidate the different modes of
equipmental failure - malfunction, temporary breakdown and permanent breakdown
- each of which disclose a different aspect of the phenomenon. Following on from this,
I argued that much observational comedy works by approaching everyday objects and
practices as something present-at-hand. In doing this, I argued that the comic situates
the audience in a position exterior to the referential context that makes the activity
intelligible, thereby making said activity seem strange.
The referential structure outlined in the fourth chapter returned in the fifth, in which
I addressed the phenomenon of the animated puppet. In §5.1, I argued that
constitutive of the 'illusion of life' found in puppetry is there being at least two
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referential contexts structuring two sets of projects which may diverge or clash. The
chapter then developed into a more general account of the phenomenon of the
anthropic object. In my view, although different anthropic objects have different
relations to their usual function, fundamental to the phenomenon of the anthropic
object is that it is characterised by being-in-the-world. As we saw in the case of the
robot in Short Circuit, becoming anthropic entails acquiring the hermeneutic
condition of humour. This claim resonated with my critique of Graeme Ritchie's work
in §1.3.1, in which I suggested that the project of computational humour theory failed
precisely because the computer is not 'in the world'.
The sixth chapter ostensibly covered similar ground to the fifth, both of which
addressed what it means for something to be 'Daseinal', or anthropic. However, I
believe that this chapter deepened and enriched my account of being-in-the-world. In
§6.3.2 I argued that a detailed account of what it means to be in the world is sufficient
to explain interpersonal understanding without recourse to 'theory of mind'.
Throughout the chapter I developed a fuller account of the temporal structure of
Daseinal comportment and the issue of authenticity. Moreover, §6.5 addressed what
precisely it means for a human to 'become animal'. I argued that this transition is best
understood using the idea of the self as the 'centre of narrative gravity', and in the
case of Gregor Samsa and Seth Brundle I argued that despite their physiological
changes they still remained Dasein. In my view, the disgust that Critchley identified as
characteristic of such a transition acts as a metaphor for disease and illness. Finally,
in §6.6 I looked at examples in which the anthropic animal 'collapses' back into
animality with a rather benignly comic effect which allows us to appreciate the
peculiarities of animal life.
The seventh chapter developed a phenomenology of physical impairment and in
doing so, towards the end, I drew out an existential analytic. In §7.1 I looked the
phenomenon of the 'anthropic body', found in cases of 'possessed hands' and
Dissociative Identity Disorder. The discussion of the former drew heavily on the
account of puppetry developed in §5.1, specifically arguing that constitutive to the
phenomenon of the 'anthropic limb' are two referential contexts structuring two sets
of projects - the projects of the limb and the projects of the human connected to it.
The discussion of the latter drew on the notion of the 'self as the centre of narrative
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gravity' developed in §6.5. The central claim was that Dasein constructs its self
through narrativistic comportment in the world, but there is no reason in principle
why there should only be one narrative. In the cases where there are more than one
narrative then there will be more than one self. After this, we moved on to cases of
more everyday physical impairment. The central claims that I made about the
impaired body can perhaps be best summarised in contrast to the account of the
dysfunctional equipment developed in chapter four. Whereas the broken tool has the
potential to disclose the referential contexture surrounding our activity, and
ultimately the world, the impaired limb has the potential to disclose our own
limitedness. In my view (in contrast to Heidegger), this disclosure acts in a similar
manner to facing one's death. That is to say, it induces an anxiety which reveals the
groundlessness of the world and throws us ineluctably back to that world.
Importantly, in my view it is precisely because of his very groundlessness that we have
the power to change that world. In short, experience of physical impairment
potentially allows us to grasp our existence authentically.
8.2 Contribution to New Knowledge
I believe that this thesis contributes primarily to the philosophy of humour. At the
heart of my critique of computational humour theory was the idea that it is not
possible to make explicit all the relevant information about the world necessary for
humour comprehension. As such, this thesis attempted to elucidate what I believe are
the most fundamental structures – what I have called the ‘hermeneutic conditions of
humour’. These are the structures without which there cannot be any humour
comprehension at all. Of course, there are still certain jokes that require more than
this – for example, a joke at the expense of Margaret Thatcher might require an
understanding of the Poll Tax riots of 1990. I want to suggest that this specific
information is, in Heidegger’s terms, ontic – and that it is only on our basis of our
being-in-the-world that we are able to acquire such understanding.
I would also suggest that this thesis contributes (albeit less directly) to the fields of
performance and film. I believe that the implications of my critique of Ritchie, and
subsequent discussions regarding the nature of mind, ought to make film and
performance theory resistant to what is becoming known as the ‘cognitive turn’ –
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particularly with respect to humour. Certain methodologies from the natural sciences
risk deworlding the phenomenon in question, thereby losing the very thing that
makes it intelligible.
Moreover, I believe that my conception of the anthropic object is a much needed
addition to the conceptual framework surrounding puppetry, object theatre and
animation. The question of what it means for an object to be humanlike is perhaps the
most pressing one within these fields, and one which I feel I go some way towards
answering.
Third, and perhaps most generally, I believe that this work constitutes a firm
grounding for future work in the phenomenology of humour. As I mentioned briefly
in the second chapter of this thesis, I believe that the 'big three' theories have all
touched on an important aspects of the phenomenon of humour, and I believe that
they can be enriched by my account of being-in-the-world. The incongruity theory, for
example, tacitly assumes a taken-for-granted background of values and assumptions
which makes up the context informing what one expects to happen. It is precisely
these expectations that are subverted in incongruity humour, and as such
phenomenological investigation of this background ought to be fruitful. Furthermore,
I would suggest that certain parts of my thesis identifies and enriches our account of
specific kinds of incongruity, such as the temporal incongruity found in chapter 7.
Regarding the superiority theory, I would argue that the 'stupid outsider' is
characterised by a lack of the sort of worldly understanding that is at issue in this
thesis. Our laughing at his stupidity is possible only on the basis of our sharing a
world and an understanding of what an intelligent person 'ought to do' in a certain
situation. Finally, as I said in §2.2 regarding release theory, I agree that certain
situations can cause a build up of tension which is then broken in moments of comic
relief. I used the example of a wartime screening of a Chaplin movie to make the case
that this tension, and the subsequent relief that we feel when it is broken, is out here
in the world. As such, I believe it is best understood phenomenologically. In my view,
we cannot understand this release of tension by trying to peer into the ghostly realm
of 'the mind'. As I made clear in §2.1.2 - 2.1.3, I believe that such a notion is
profoundly confused.
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8.3 Areas for Development and Further Exploration
Before concluding the thesis as a whole, it is perhaps worth briefly outlining the areas
in which I think these ideas could be further developed. Perhaps the most
conspicuous absence within these pages is how one might put the ideas into practice.
Whilst I did consider 'testing' them practically when writing my initial thesis
proposal, I decided against doing this for two reasons.
First and foremost, this thesis is an attempt to outline a fundamental structure
underpinning all humorous phenomena. As such, I have tried to use a wide variety of
examples to develop and support my ideas. In principle, no practical work that I
developed to supplement the thesis could be more illustrative than the examples that
I have selected. Moreover, the ideas that I have presented are not divorced from my
own experience as a practitioner. In fact, it was my experience as a puppeteer,
director and writer of comedy that initiated my interest in these areas, and since
starting the thesis I have been performing (and sometimes dying) as a stand-up on
the open mic circuit in London. As such, although the influence of my practice has
been indirect and tacit, I suspect that anyone who has seen my practical work will
notice its influence.
Secondly, I felt that supplementing my account of the phenomenon from the
audiences perspective with my own experiences creating work would confuse the
phenomenon at hand. For example, when viewed from the auditorium the puppet,
robot and stop-motion figure are all fundamentally the same - they are examples of
ostensibly anthropic objects. This fact gets confused when looking at it from the
performer’s perspective, as the means of manipulation are very different for each
artform. However, I do think this is a potential avenue for further phenomenological
exploration. There is an extent to which this is already being done - it is fairly easy to
find an event where puppeteers or animators describe what it is like to manipulate a
puppet or stop-motion figure, but I feel there is much to be gained from systematic
phenomenology of these experiences. For my part, as someone who has neither made
a stop-motion film nor controlled a sophisticated robot, I suspect it might be some
time before I will be able to start writing such an account.
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Notwithstanding these issues, there is a sense in which I would like work on and
develop these ideas practically and it is my hope to do post-doctoral research
pursuing just that. Specifically, through my research for this thesis I have developed
an interest in Autism Spectrum Disorder, which is often said to be accompanied by
deficits in humour comprehension. As will hopefully be clear from my discussion of
the condition in §3.2.2, I believe that a number of clinicians have misconstrued the
disorder as a deficit in mind-reading. Against this view, I suspect that autism is more
fundamentally a social and 'narrativising' disorder,163 which later causes the welldocumented poor performance in 'mind-reading’ tests. If I am correct in this view,
then this has two implications - first and foremost, that Heideggerean
phenomenology might be a useful paradigm for understanding the disorder. I made
an argument along this vein at a Heidegger conference in 2010, and through working
on this thesis my conviction on this matter has become much stronger. Secondly,
running comedy workshops with, and comic performances for, people on the autistic
spectrum might allow us an important insight into the development of humour
comprehension. I believe that this thesis provides a strong critical framework for this,
but I feel that this sort of project needs to be done in collaboration with autism
specialists. In short, it is a project that would require a high level of institutional
support, which I am hoping to secure at some point in the future.
As such I hope it is clear that, for me, this thesis is not so much an endpoint as a
beginning – an attempt to clarify conceptual knots in existing humour theory and lay
out a solid critical framework for future research. In doing so, I hope I have made at
least a modest contribution to that almost paradoxical intellectual enterprise – taking
humour seriously.
This is a point made by Daniel Hutto a philosopher who, along with with Matthew Ratcliffe, has deeply
influenced my thinking on this matter.
163
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Films and Other Recorded Media
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BBC Productions (1989) Red Dwarf [S03E01]
BFI DVD Publishing (2007) Jan Svankmajer - The Complete Short Films (dir. Jan
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British Broadcasting Corporation (1975) Fawlty Towers - Gourmet Night. [S01E05]
(dir. John Howard Davies)
Brooksfilms (1980) The Elephant Man [Dir. David Lynch]
Bwark Productions (2010) The Inbetweeners – A Trip to Warwick [S04E03]
Columbia Pictures (1964) Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb. [Dir. Stanley Kubrick]
Goodnight Vienna Productions (2003) Peter Kay: Live at the Bolton Albert Halls
Goodnight Vienna Productions (2001) Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights [S01E04] (dir.
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Mandate Pictures (2006) Stranger than Fiction. (dir. Marc Forster)
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (2007) Lars and the Real Girl (dir. Craig Gillespie)
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (1968) 2001, A Space Odyssey. (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (1933) Busy Bodies. (dir. Lloyd French)
Mutual Film Corporation (1917) The Immigrant. (dir. Charles Chaplin)
Nina Conti (2008) Melbourne International Comedy Gala, available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xaojc_btxfk. (Accessed 30.06.2012)
Open Mike Manchester (2009) Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow: Rhod
Gilbert. [S01E01]
Richard Herring (2012) Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Comedy Podcast.
(Episode 3, Francesca Martinez) [Podcast]
Thames Television (1991) Mr. Bean Goes to Town. [S01E04] (dir. John Birkin & Paul
Weiland)
The Onion (2011) Scientists Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday, available at
http://www.theonion.com/video/scientists-successfully-teach-gorilla-it-willdie,17165/ (Accessed 19.05.2012)
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Tiger Aspect Productions (1993) Mr. Bean in Room 426 [E01E08] (dir. John Birkin &
Paul Weiland)
Touchstone Pictures (1988) Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (dir. Robert Zemeckis)
TriStar Pictures (1986) Short Circuit (dir. John Badham)
Twentieth Century Fox (2010) Family Guy - Brian Writes a Bestseller [S09E06]
Twentieth Century Fox (2007) Family Guy - Barely Legal [S05E08]
Twentieth Century Fox (2007) Family Guy - The Tan Aquatic with Steve Zissou
[S05E11]
Twentieth Century Fox (2005) Family Guy – Brian Goes Back to College. [S04E15]
Twentieth Century Fox (2000) Me, Myself and Irene. (dir. Farrelly Brothers)
Twentieth Century Fox (1999) Family Guy - Brian: Portrait of a Dog [S01E07]
Twentieth Century Fox (1986) The Fly. (dir. David Cronenberg)
Twentieth Century Fox (1968) Planet of the Apes. (dir. Franklin Shaffner)
Tyrone Productions (2005) Endgame (dir. Conor McPherson) [Part of the Beckett on
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United Artists (1925) The Gold Rush. (dir. Charlie Chaplin)
United Artists (1928) The Circus. (dir. Charlie Chaplin)
United Artists (1936) Modern Times. (dir. Charlie Chaplin)
Universal Pictures (2009) Funny People. (dir. Judd Apatow)
Universal Studios (2006) Like, Totally...Dylan Moran Live. (dir. Michael Matheson)
Vision Videos (1997) Eddie Izzard: Glorious.
Live Performances
Blind Summit Theatre (2012) The Table. Soho Theatre, London. 12.01.2012
Blind Summit Theatre (2011) The Table. Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh. 25.08.2011
Handspring Theatre Company (2011) Or You Could Kiss Me. National Theatre,
09.11.2011
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Francesca Martinez (2012) What the F*** is Normal?. Tricycle Theatre, London.
08.06.2012
Nina Conti (2008) Evolution. Soho Theatre, London. [DVD]