November 25,
1943
The Comic.
Einführung
What are we
searching for? We are searching for the conditions, under which a
phenomenon—any phenomenon—provokes the attitude of laughter, due to a
convergence of circumstances or due to an intentional or unintentional gesture.
As someone
said: We want to know the conditions that constitute deadness in contrast to
the living, without regard to whether the man died by chance or was killed
intentionally, passed away in his bed
because of old age or perished in an
ill-fated occurrence, took the measure of
life in the midst of heroic action or croaked
in a maelstrom of sin and vice, given his
soul to god in an edifying manner, laid
to rest in a comely fashion, left for
a better world within the time allotted him by God, or on the contrary by lifting his own hand against himself, kicked the bucket as a bum or took the final bow as a tramp, departed, etc., etc.
The basic
conditions of the comic.
“The comic
equation,” as mathematicians would have put it.
And the funny
thing is that the method of equation [equalization] is the first condition—the
first visible appearance of this condition (further on, equation will appear as
a means for bringing about unity, unification).
(Rourke,
“American Humor”—humor as means of unification.)
Here we must,
evidently, make a transgression[i] to the
question where from comes the urge
[English in original] towards equation (what exactly is the mathematical method
of equation a reflection of?).
Not the primacy
of the concept of equality, but rather the process of a willed orientation
towards it as a consequence of the destruction of the primary condition of
equality.
On equality in
this sense, Engels says the following (see Appendix to Anti-Dühring):
“The idea that
equality is a manifestation of justice, which serves as a principle of the
modern political and social order, emerged fully only through a historical
process. In primitive societies equality did not exist; if there was equality it was only
by significantly restraining access to full-fledged communal membership and
without excluding slavery. The
same must also be said about ancient democracy. Equality of all people—Greeks,
Romans and barbarians, free men and slaves, natives and foreigners, citizens
and clients, etc.—appeared to ancient minds not only as something irrational,
but also as something criminal. From this point of view it was inevitable that
the original expression of equality of all people in Christianity would provoke
persecution. In Christianity, equality was first expressed in the negative
form, as equality of sinners in front of God, and in the stricter sense as the
equality of the children of God redeemed by the grace and the blood of Christ.
[…] Rousseau, still in the mode of a universal human demand, for the first time
forcefully formulated the bourgeois party’s demand for equality. […]
And thus the
principle “equality = justice” needed for its development almost all of human
history; the formation of this principle became possible only when the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat already came into existence. The principle of
equality comprises the claim that privileges should not exist. It is, therefore,
an essentially negative principle. It contains the claim that all of human
history thus far has been bad. […] Yet it is absurd to pass “equality = justice” off
as the highest principle and the ultimate truth. Equality exists only in
opposition to inequality, justice in opposition to injustice; in these terms
therefore lies the opposition in relation to all hitherto historical
development.” (F. Engels, “Anti-Dühring,” Gospolitizdat, 1938, p. 296-7).
Should we not understand equality, equation (in mathematics), simply as a specific
mode of embodiment, which is the inverse of the tendency towards unity?
This becomes almost
tangible in the reflections formed by a consciousness at the stage at which the
unity is already lost and what exists is not only non-unity but also the
inequality of what has been disunited.
Here then
enters, as material, what Engels does in his preparatory work for Anti-Dühring.
The absence of
ideas of equality and identity during the “happy” stages of human development.
For instance,
with the Chinese.
The absence of
adequation between the designation and the designatum (that is, the lack of
equality between that which you name and [that which] you expect to find).
Cf. Arthur
Smith, “Chinesische Charakterzüge,” deutsch von
F.C.Dürbig, Würzburg, 1900. Chapter VI: “Die Geringschatzung der
Genauigkeit,”
p. 33:
“For a student of the Chinese language
there almost immediately appears one of the fundamental difficulties—how to adequately
express equality as something distinct from similarity.
The Chinese
image of thought is based on assumptions that are completely different from the
ones we are used to, and a Chinese man is able to comprehend only with great difficulty the maniacal desire of a Westerner to determine everything with
absolute precision.”
In this as well
as in the next chapter (“Das Talent für
Missverständnisse”) one
finds an infinite number of examples.
Most of them
are clearly reducible to the rules of sensuous thought.
For example,
the distance from A to B is not equal to the distance from B to A. (“From tail
to head, from head to tail”—one of the most obvious absurdities; and even our
children learn as one of their first the anecdote about the menagerie.) In one
case this is obvious—going “up the mountain” and “down the mountain”; the
expenditure of the carrier’s energy differs accordingly. Thus, the lack of
separation between the objective and the subjective element.
Or: “I paid him
200 coppers, although I actually gave him only 173, but it doesn’t make a
difference.” (Page 32)
The language of
“rounding off” instead of precise facts. The stage at which pars = toto!
[From:
Sergei Eisenstein, Metod, Vol. 2
(Moscow: Muzei kino, 2002), 379-81.]
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