Kierkegaard on Farce (2017)
ISSN 2545-4277
KIERKEGAARD ON FARCE
Jasna KOTESKA
1.
Dual Nature of the Social Order
In 1840s Kierkegaard
developed the idea that humans cannot even be sure if they believe at all.
Ultimately they only believe that they believe.
Kierkegaard noticed the
strange power of performativity in religious practices.
Something strange happens when religion materializes, as it
regularly sort of appears as a form of theater, or performance, or Posse (“I
perform that I believe, therefore I believe”). Such performativity seems to be
imbedded in social reality as well. Kierkegaard noticed that the social
order, that maintains social harmony, is based on the dual nature of the laws:
there is one publicly articulated law, but behind it, as a shadow, there is
always the opposite obscene “law”. For example, a person spits on the street
when no one is looking, runs a red traffic light, etc., in other words, a
person would violate the law here and there, not as an act of resistance to the
community, but paradoxically, in the name of the desire for imaginary
identification with the “communal spirit.” Notice how no one
believes that a family man is sexually satisfied; he must find a lover to
convince the community that he has finally started enjoying himself.
Other examples are the paradoxes around liberal and conservative upbringing. In the film, American Pie (1999), by Paul Weitz, the father is trying very hard to introduce his son to the secrets of sex, but paradoxically the father’s obscene behaviour only instills a feeling of shame in the son and a desire to retreat. The father would actually help the son if he would most conservatively forbid him to date girls, to which the son would respond with resistance. Or recall the screenplay disaster of Emmanuelle 2 (1975), from the erotic series about Emmanuelle by Giacobetti that followed after the married couple agreed to live in an open marriage. Another example is the behaviour of the adulterers themselves. When they are caught in flagrant adultery, they deny it with all their might because they intuitively know that an admission of adultery is a more dramatic blow to the relationship than the act of adultery itself. “If he/she is ready to admit, that means that he/she really does not love me.” If there is no prohibition and everything is allowed, then paradoxically, nothing is allowed, Kierkegaard wrote.
Other examples are the paradoxes around liberal and conservative upbringing. In the film, American Pie (1999), by Paul Weitz, the father is trying very hard to introduce his son to the secrets of sex, but paradoxically the father’s obscene behaviour only instills a feeling of shame in the son and a desire to retreat. The father would actually help the son if he would most conservatively forbid him to date girls, to which the son would respond with resistance. Or recall the screenplay disaster of Emmanuelle 2 (1975), from the erotic series about Emmanuelle by Giacobetti that followed after the married couple agreed to live in an open marriage. Another example is the behaviour of the adulterers themselves. When they are caught in flagrant adultery, they deny it with all their might because they intuitively know that an admission of adultery is a more dramatic blow to the relationship than the act of adultery itself. “If he/she is ready to admit, that means that he/she really does not love me.” If there is no prohibition and everything is allowed, then paradoxically, nothing is allowed, Kierkegaard wrote.
The paradoxes of these
types are based on the fact that order is ambivalent and sends out
contradictory signals. In an ideological world a dual law is
always in play - the visible one (the allowed) and the hidden one (the
obscene). Where does this split in the law come from, why is
the law split in two and why is one thing propagated and another “obeyed?” That
is because the law is not all encompassing; laws are insufficient and can never
cover all areas of permissions and offenses.
The Russian formalist,
Bakhtin, wrote extensively about the essence of carnivals, and the
joy they incite is not to turn the world upside down, but that
the world needs to empty itself, a periodical public acting out, liberating
from the rigid signalization of the public law. Since ancient times, carnival
celebrations saw men dressed up as women and princes transformed into slaves;
for that one night, all of them got a chance to free themselves from the
meaningless roles imposed by and around sex and class. There is a story about
Queen Elisabeth of Hungary, a gorgeous princess who, however, loved to
publically humiliate herself. Carnival behaviour was an opportunity to relieve
the tension of the “imposed” social categories and order, to “suspend the law.”
And paradoxically, what holds the community together is not the publically
declared law, but this violation of it.
2.
To Walk versus
To Come Walking (Beckmann versus Chaplin)
The first part of Repetition is
almost entirely devoted to the issue of a farce. Kierkegaard used the
word Posse (meaning dent or bump). Kierkegaard’s
love of theater is well documented, but in Repetition he does
not talk about just any theater, but about a specific genre. Farce is not an
established canonic tragedy or comedy; it is a popular theater (as if by
comparison, a philosopher today will write about a reality show). Kierkegaard
left a detailed explanation about Berlin’s performances, and these parts of the
book are explained in wonderful detail: he give advice about which are the best
seats in the various balconies, what tickets for which boxes one should buy,
discussing how the spectators from the audience look at each other, how their
reactions differ, what kinds of gossips are being produced there, etc. And he
explains his fundamental love of farce as follows:
“Since neither tragedy,
nor comedy, nor satire will satisfy him, precisely because of their perfection,
he returns to farce… In farce one does not know whether one should laugh or
cry. The whole effect depends upon the mood of the observer. There is no one
who has not been through a period when no richness of language, no passionate
interjection, was sufficient, when no expression, no gesticulation was
satisfactory, because nothing satisfied except the wildest spontaneous leaps
and somersaults… To watch a farce is, for the sophisticated, like playing the
lottery, only without the unpleasantness of winning money. Such uncertainty
does not serve the ordinary theatergoing public… They like, therefore, to
denigrate farce or look down on it contemptuously, which is the worse for them.
A real theatergoing public generally has a certain narrow-minded seriousness...
While in tragedy or comedy, one knows what to expect of the play, such
prescience is impossible with farce, because the same farce can leave two very
different impressions, and what is strange is that it can be least effective
when it is best performed. One cannot, therefore, trust the reviews of friends
and neighbors and the newspapers concerning whether it was entertaining. That
determination can be made only by the individual”.[2]
Posse (farce) involves deformity, something that
breaks the contour of things, it is a disruption of a continuity of the self.
Kierkegaard was drawn to farce, to the question of performativity,
and its potential for tearing apart the social tissue of reality. Since early
in his life -- in 1838 already Kierkegaard drafted a philosophical comedy The
Battle between the Old and New Soap-Cellars, his doctorate dissertation was
about the concept of irony in Socrates, etc. And in his brilliant analysis of
Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Samuel Weber says that Kierkegaard’s
style throughout his books does not resemble the lyrical or the prose writing,
as much as it resembles – a scenario![3] His Repetition is
staged as a theater, the arguments are given different voices, therefore the
book, although it has consistency, as we said earlier, it does not necessarily
have unity. That is because Kierkegaard experimented with the potential to
break the book into many parts, to give voices to different characters in order
to test the true meaning of repetition.
And interestingly
enough, Kierkegaard used farce once again to question the concept of the movement.
Kierkegaard writes:
“In serious theatre one
rarely sees an actor who can actually walk or stand well… [In farce, the actor]
does not just walk, he comes walking. To come walking is
something completely different, and with this ingenious action he sets the
whole scene…”[4]
Repetition opened with the movement Diogenes made to
dismiss the school of Eleatics. And already on the next few pages, the book
transforms into a complicated inquiry about the movement of a person in a
farce. The character in a farce does not walk, but he comes walking,
Kierkegaard says. What was so different about the way the
famous German actor of that time, Beckmann, walks? Samuel Weber compares the
walking of Beckmann (as described in Kierkegaard) with that of Chaplin, because
they both walk in a specific manner, and they both carry a small bundle on
their shoulder. But their walk is not the same. Charlie Chaplin walks as
someone who walks differently from others, he walks with exaggeration, with a
stylization, in order to represents “a nobody” among the crowds of
people, but he does not go down a path from which there is no return. In a
farce, on the other hand, Beckmann comes not in the expected ways, even if this
is calculated geometry, a performance, even if is a repetition, even when it is
a simulation.[5] What is peculiar about
Beckmann is that he shifts while walking: he shifts the
registers of movements, he starts with incredible speed and then exaggerates
slowness, or vice versa.
But – and this is of
crucial difference - Beckmann walks as if he is already leaving! He walks as if
he is already going away. Kierkegaard was fascinated by this dual
character of movement in a farce: the actors don’t just walk, they
come walking. At the same time they walk not in order to arrive at some point,
but they walk as if they are already leaving. “The figure is moving away from
any kind of fixation”, writes Weber. What attracted Kierkegaard so much to
farce was the fact that the figure loses its contours in a movement, it
dissolves “in a bath of laughter”, as Weber writes.
“In a bath of laugher”
-- laughter is of a specific interest of Kierkegaard, and he is drawn to farce
because one can never know if the particular performance will be entertaining
or not, one has to allow oneself to be lost in the performance Kierkegaard: “No
effect of a farce is brought about through irony, but through naivety. The
spectator must therefore become involved as an individual with the spectacle.”[6] Today’s comedy (let’s call it “commercial comedy”
or “consumerist comedy”), on the other hand, does not invoke losing oneself,
but the other way around: the act of laughter is used to fix the self, to fix
and uniform the audience. The laughter in the corporate comedy is an artificial
laughter. The so-called “laugh track”, or “laughter track” were introduced
in the American sitcoms in the 1950s. It consisted of a separate soundtrack for
a recorded comedy show containing the sound of audience laughter, and it was
first invented by the American sound engineer Charles Douglass. The mysterious
“laff box” (the recorded laughs) were first incorporated in the American
sitcom The Hank McCune Show in the 1950s, and it soon become
“the only laugh game” in the industry of comedy. Even prior the
mechanization of the laughter, already Kafka criticized humor in the movies.
The silent movies arrived in Prague before the First World War, and Kafka often
went to the cinema.
In one of his
testimonies about the early silent American movies, Kafka writes:
“Chaplin is a
technician. He’s man of a machine world, in which most of his fellow men no
longer command the requisite emotional and mental equipment to make the life
allotted to them really their own. They lack imagination. As a dental
technician makes false teeth, so he manufactures aids to the imagination.
That’s what his films are. That’s what films in general are”.[7]
“He manufactures aids to
the imagination”, Kafka wrote, essentially the same thing which troubled
Kierkegaard, why the superficiality of humor, how it came that humor began to
be used for anesthetizing the audience? Kierkegaard’s love of farce, among
other things, stemmed from the potentiality of the farce to dissolve, to
suspend the false unity of the audience, of humanity. The
hysterical laughter that farce produces does not stabilize the subject, does
not unify the audience, but on the contrary, it deconstructs the audience as
wholeness, it displays its false unity, and Kierkegaard in great details
explained precisely how different parts of the audience react differently to
performances of farce. Consumerist usage of humor, on the other hand, works
completely in the opposite way, and one described by Kafka: as a technical tool
for falsely manufacturing unity (A few years ago an interesting phenomena
spread on the internet, as a small movement of ironically mocking the laughter
in today’s advertising industry; it’s name: Women laughing alone with
salads. There are several web sites dedicated to these phenomena, as ironic
comments on today’s consumerism. They post advertisements of women with salads,
and some of the comments read: “She finally achieved the perfect scoop of
salad”, or women who are holding bowls of salads but are actually smiling at
something else in the distance: “There is a really funny clown just out of the
frame; he tells salad jokes), or: “Why would I socialize with the people at the
party when I have my salad”, etc. In March 2014 a text “I Was a Woman Laughing
Alone with a Salad, it’s Really Not that Funny” in The Guardian was
published by Sarah Hartshorne where, inspired by the stock photography used by
many advertising companies,[8] she pointed to
gender aspects of using advertisements to impose schizophrenic identities on
women today (in this case used by the multi-million dollar industries of food),
as they are forcing women to be multi-taskers: mothers, sex objects, consumers
of food, etc. in short by using stereotypes they falsely fix the identities of
their consumers. While, to come back to Kierkegaard - for him laughter (in
farce) has a potential to do precisely the opposite, and what Weber calls “to
die laughing” - farce forms a certain relation to death, death of a fixed
image, and laugh precisely at this truth, that a person is not fixed; you lose
yourself, but not in a negative sense. Being spaced out, losing one’s sense of
self, the contours are erased, the sense of moving differently is introduced –
this is why for Kierkegaard farce had a rare power as an art form that tells
the truth about us as human beings.
3.
Gjentagelse and Consumerism
In Danish the word
“repetition” existed, but Kierkegaard instead used the word Gjentagelse -
formed from the words gjen (with the meaning to begin)
and tagelse (to take). The literal translation of Gjentagelse is: to
take again. In Repetition Kierkegaard applauded the
Danish language for coining the word of a philosophical importance:
“Repetition
(gjentagelse) is a good Danish word, and I congratulate the Danish language for
its contribution to philosophical terminology”.[9]
Constantin Constantius
experimented with what exactly means to take something again.
Can a person achieve a profound happiness not by the occurrence of the new,
not even by the occurrence of the same again (as in the Latin:
repetition), but by the act of taking (the lost) from the
past again. “Gjentagelse makes one happy because it suggests
the possibility of recovering what has been lost, of overcoming the transience
of time and ultimately, finitude”, Weber writes, and he makes a very important
point about the repetition and consumerism:
“(Kierkegaard) takes an
everyday trivial expression, such as ‘Hold on a second, I’ve forgotten
something, I’d better go back and get it’. What could be more common, more
banal: A slight inadvertence, ‘wait a minute, I’ll be right back’. It reminds
me of the eternal litany of American television, which interrupts its programs
every few minutes with the admonition: ‘Stay with us, we’ll be right back after
this message’. Only here, in Kierkegaard’s text, the ‘message’ is that we may
not be right back, not even if we buy everything that Kierkegaard-Constantin is
selling”... This is not so unfamiliar today: indeed it may very well be at the
heart of what we call ‘consumerism’. But more generally, this sense that the
most trivial details may be the tip of an iceberg consisting of a mass of
things that we would prefer to ignore – this is also one of the leitmotifs of
+ian psychoanalysis.”[10]
For the ideology of
consumerism the importance of these lines is everlasting -- Weber introduces
the idea that repetition and consumerism are closely linked: corporations are
using repetition to promise that what humans are missing will be mediated, and
they will be made complete again. But what if the primordial lack cannot be
mediated? What if the fundamental lack is the natural state of humans? Even
more dramatically, the ideological world is constructed in such a way that it
does not let you forget that there is an initial, primal, primordial lack in
the first place. The consumerist universe parasites precisely on this
primordial lack, and it needs to announce it again and again: “Stay with us,
we’ll be right back”. The shortage cannot be forgotten, the consumer has to be
warned over and over again. I am coming to take it again.
“Wait a second, I forgot
something” in the language of TV commercials means precisely the opposite:
they forget nothing, and they don’t allow the consumer
to forget, as well. But when introducing the concept of repetition, Kierkegaard
had something else in mind. His repetition was meant as a reminder of Plato’s
idea that true meaning is stored in the past, and it can be rediscovered again
by recollection, by the remembrance that we already posses the truth. But
modern times already forgot the ancient concept that truth
does not require effort, that the subject already has all the resources it
needs. The Kierkegaardian model is more pessimistic: we no longer have means of
accessing truth, the Socratic model is no longer available for humans as they
lost their faith, so they have to repeat the knowledge by means of repetition.
The Ancient Greek model says that the salvation will come from remembering
the past. The modern concept says that the recovery, if possible at
all, will arrive only from the unknown future, through the act of
repetition. For Kierkegaard recollection is no longer possible; we have to
replace it with repetition.
Psychoanalysis treats
repetition as a symptom of a kind: the reduction of tension happens only when
we have something familiar, known, old, while the arrival of
the new (unknown) always causes anxiety. A person discovers
the situation which once gave her/him pleasure; when “re-discovered” anew the
subject cherishes the state of repeatability, "now as always". But
psychoanalysis also warns us that in repetition there is a certain refusal to
recognize the past, and hence: time. During repetition, a person finds in the
present what has been missed in the past. Psychoanalysis says that repetition
is “remembering as a habit”, it is a habitual memory, which does not represent
the past, but it sort of plays the past, or in Kierkegaardian
terms, it performs the past, while at all times it remains the
element of the present moment. When I remember, I remember
what made a given scene different from others in the past. On
the other hand, when I repeat something, I repeat a given situation, habit or
image and am trying to find what makes the given scene similar to
others. In other words, repetition is always a play of the same performance.[11] Time
does not flow, and although repetition insists on the years that passed by, it
does so in order to confirm that time is always already frozen.
Kierkegaard was well
aware of this time paradox and in Repetition he
describes a scene when he arrives for the second time in the Berlin theater,
but this time he fails to see the girl who was a frequent visitor. The
performance is now awful, the narrator cannot find the previous peace and he
concludes that repetition is impossible: pure repetition does not exist, what
exists is the sadness of recollection. It is not possible to take everything
back again! Here two more concepts related to repetition should be
introduced: the Freud’s fort-da narration, and also the
concept of uncanny, and we are leaving them for some other
investigation.
RESUME
The article Kierkegaard
on Farce deals with the question of farce in the works of the Danish
philosopher and the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855),
most notably in his work Repetition (1843). It proposes that
Kierkegaard saw farce as a powerful tool to question not only the
performativity, the nature of movements, the repetition, the uniformity, but
also the very foundations of our symbolic order.
KEY WORDS: Søren Kierkegaard, farce.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Kierkegaard,
Soren, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, Kierkegaard, Repetition
and Philosophical Crumbs, Oxford University Press, 2009.
2. Weber with Smith,
“Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image”, 1996.
3. Janouch, Gustav. Conversations
with Kafka. Introduction by Francine Prose. New York: New Directions, 2012.
4. Hartshorne, “I Was a
Woman Laughing Alone with Salad, it’s Really Not that Funny”, The
Guardian, 2014.
5. Sedler, M. „Freud’s Concept of Working Through“, in: Psychoanalytic Quaterly, No.
52, 1983.
[1] The text is an
excerpt from the book: Jasna Koteska, Kierkegaard on Consumerism, The
Aesthetical, the Ethical, and the Religious Reading, Kierkegaard Circle,
University of Toronto and Central European Research Institute Soren
Kierkegaard, Ljubljana, 2016, ISBN 978-1-988129-02-0
[2] Kierkegaard, Repetition
and Philosophical Crumbs, 26-28.
[3] Weber with Smith,
“Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image”, 1996.
[4] Kierkegaard, Repetition
and Philosophical Crumbs, 32.
[5] Weber with Smith.
“Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image”, 1996.
[6] Kierkegaard, Repetition
and Philosophical Crumbs, 29.
[7] Janouch, Conversations
with Kafka. 159.
[8] Hartshorne, “I Was
a Woman Laughing Alone with Salad, it’s Really Not that Funny”, The
Guardian, 2014.
[9] Kierkegaard, Repetition
and Philosophical Crumbs, 18.
[10] Weber with Smith,
“Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image”, 1996.
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