Eli Reads...

In this episode I couldn't help thinking of Tati. "Something mechanical encrusted upon the living" was essentially his bottomless subject in movies like Playtime. The snowball effect is used over and over again, usually with different stages of the snowball unaware of the existence of the others. And the jack in the box. And and and.

I bet it would have been fun watching a movie with Bergson.

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I was watching Fleabag tonight and thought of this essay.

p.s. I snipped a graf that went into a lot of detailed examples from French theatre. Sorry not sorry.

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I really like this section. About halfway through, it really becomes something quite beautiful and profound.

On this read-through I'm struck by how many examples from stage and literature Bergson examines. And it ain't just high art - his description of the clowns in this section makes Itchy and Scratchy look like the intelligentsia.

“The comic” for Bergson is actually two things: what people laugh at in general, in their day-to-day lives; and the special, stylised, constructed comic of fiction. Bergson glides from the one to the other and back, like a camera operator racking the focus on a shot. Using art to illustrate life and vice versa, with comedy as the refractor, the focal point that bridges both worlds - the constructed and the sloppy mess of everything else. The laugh, the shaking of the body, the curious barking whinnies that come from us - are the same in both of those worlds, and respond to the same stimulus.

But of course, when we’re leading our supple, slack, unscripted regular lives, we’re still following scripts, after a fashion. Scripts that have been drilled into us by habit and routine, or scripts we’ve learned recently, like the right tone to take with a new colleague, or a new partner. Revealing these rigidities can be hilarious. 

Is this the relationship between art and life that Bergson wants to investigate? How constructed-ness can be embedded off the stage, in even the most intimate details of our lives? And it’s laughter that tells us when we’ve gone too far? I think it is, but that’s not Bergson’s whole point.

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In which we learn that sitting is funnier than standing. I'm not sure I buy it but who am I to argue with Napoleon?

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There's a passage in here that makes the hair on my neck stand up. "There is a logic of the imagination which is not the logic of reason, one which at times is even opposed to the latter,- with which, however, philosophy must reckon." Is there any better distillation of the phenomenon of Brexit, of voting against one's interests, of fake news? And the call for a philosophy which reckons with it - a call still unanswered?

Bergson is very close here, some dozen years before Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious, to talking about a kind of primal structuring of thought which works independently from, and even against, rationality. But in a stroke he broadens the palette, and may as well be talking about semiotics - the theory of signs. Because the dreams that interest Bergson are "dreams that have not been left to the whim of individual fancy, being the dreams dreamt by the whole of society." Dreams dreamt by the whole of society! We need some deep juju to deal with these.

Presented and produced by Eli Sessions. Music by Underscore Orkestra.

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Bergson died in 1941. I really hope he was fit enough to get out to the cinema in 1936 to see Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, a manic, joyful literalization of everything he's saying here. I have to think he saw it. He must have loved it. The Great Dictator came out in 1940 so that's more doubtful. But if Bergson did see it, he would have seen his passages about imitable gestures brought to fruition in all their glory. Like the discovery of Cygnus-X1 decades after Einstein had posited the existence of black holes.

I mispronounced "automata"! I realise that now. :(

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Comedy's relationship with ugliness and beauty. ("Unsprightly vs unsightly" - nice one, Cloudesley!) The listener may wonder why Bergson's having this discussion at all. From what I can tell, this is a response to an 1853 essay by Karl Rosenkranz called The Aesthetics of Ugliness. In it, not only does the reader receive a finely argued discourse on why we laugh at farts - surely an important contribution - but a detailed attempt to situate ugliness on a continuum between the beautiful and... yes, the comic. Making beauty not the opposite of ugliness, but of FUNNINESS. Bergson doesn't try to refute this argument - instead he probes it for nutrients. And ultimately assimilates it.

Presented and produced by Eli Sessions. Music from The Underscore Orkestra.

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Imagine you had the power to invoke a command performance of the funniest standup in the world, doing her routine just for you, at your house. It would be awful. Comedy depends on the social. You might laugh at a TV show by yourself, but that laughter is implicitly shared with other, unknown watchers, with society at large, or at least the society of people who might conceivably make up the audience for that particular show. That's how mass media are generally experienced: alone, but with the knowledge that there are others experiencing them too. But a live comedian with an audience of one? Risible. In fact, there's even something funny about the situation. Removing the audience and expecting the show to work betrays a rigidity of thinking - an arrogance that one could just transpose a form into a new setting without needing to adapt it.

I love Bergson's insistence on physical pratfalls and stupid pranks. In my experience French people laugh at nothing harder than someone walking into a lamp-post. I think it's part of their cruelty. But of course we all laugh at people walking into lamp-posts. So we all share in that cruelty.

I need to see more Molière.

Presented and produced by Eli Sessions. Music from The Underscore Orkestra.

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On the cutting room floor: a bit of the introduction; the transformer humming on a hard-to-reach piece of equipment; the word "table d'hôte" which I probably could have translated as "common table" but which essentially doesn't exist in modern life anymore so I couldn't think of a self-evident translation.

In this section I have a hard time with Bergson's contention that you have to put your emotions out of bounds in order to laugh. He doesn't really justify it. Later in the essay he comes back to it in a more convincing way, but here it reads strangely. Why would being in full sympathy with every object in the world cast a "gloom" over existence? What's stranger is that it doesn't help his main contention here, which is that laughter is fundamentally social. It's fundamentally social - yet we put all sympathy aside? He comes back to this. I just want you to know that if you're slightly baffled at this, I hear you.

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A little bit about the translator Cloudesley Brereton's wife: she was Maud Brereton. There's a photograph of her on the Cambridge University website, where she was briefly Principal of Homerton College. Between WWI and WWII she was a proponent of something akin to what we'd now call Universal Basic Income - arguing that unpaid unemployment was a stupid and inefficient way of organising things. Hats off. Anybody want to make a podcast about her? :)

Presented and produced by Eli Sessions.

Music from The Underscore Orkestra.

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