悖论和间接传播 场景

EJPC 1 (2) pp. 225–236 © Intellect Ltd 2009 225 Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication Volume 1 Number 2 © 2009 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejpc.1.2.225_1 Keywords Paradox comic drama art double meaning Shakespeare Chesterton ‘I am not what I am’: Paradox and indirect communication – the case of the comic god and the dramaturgical self Peter Murphy Monash University Abstract An exploration of the self in dramaturgical societies: This is the double, duplic- itous, witty self, the one who communicates indirectly through characters and masks, the self who is a personality, who knowingly plays a role on the public stage, and who inhabits a wry, not to say awry, paradoxical world created by a mischievous comic God. A motley bunch of characters wander across the stage of this article. These include recusant Catholics, American sociologists, theologians of paradox, philosophers of comedy, Oscar Schindler, Mick Jagger, William Shakespeare, G.K. Chesterton, as well as various assorted epicurean puritans, inventive liars, elusive playwrights, pompous intellectuals, sleuth- ing heroes from detective fiction, ambitious pretenders, satirists of newspaper folly, media nitwits, boys playing girls playing boys, and, if you are really good, girls playing boys playing girls. All of them bearing testament to Viola’s immortal line: ‘I am not what I am’. George: Rather close line there, eh sir? That phone system is a shambles, no wonder we haven’t had any orders! Edmund: Oh, on the contrary, George, we’ve had plenty of orders. We have orders for six meters of Hungarian crushed velvet curtain material, four rock salmon and a ha’pence of chips and a cab for a Mr. Redgrave picking up from 14 Arnost Grove Raintop Bell. George: Rather we don’t want those sort of orders, we want orders to Deck Old Glory. When are we going to give Fritz a taste of our British spunk? Edmund: George, please. No one is more anxious to advance than I am, but until I get these communication problems sorted out, I’m afraid we’re stuck. (Phone rings.) Captain Blackadder speaking ... no, I’m afraid the line’s very cclllffffhhtttt! (Richards and Elton 1989) God is a joker. This sets the tone for the world. Humanity is distin- guished from the beasts by our ability to laugh and to make others EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 225EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 225 5/28/10 9:18:55 AM5/28/10 9:18:55 AM 226 Peter Murphy laugh. Dogs do not laugh and cats do not make jokes. We are the funny species. Therefore it is plausible that humankind was conceived in the image of a witty God. Whether this is true or not, it is at least a tantalizing hypothesis. Let us be content to say that God is a heuristic that allows us to better understand the nature of things. But before you get too comfortable, in the warm glow of that tender nostrum, be warned – there is nothing simple about understanding. For what we best understand is the salutary by-product of what we most mis- understand. The joke exemplifies this. To make a joke, I forge a horizon of understanding with someone else – and then I smash it to pieces. I engage in the classic hermeneutic act – and then I shred it. I stamp all over it. A joke is misleading. It feigns one meaning then it delivers another, entirely different meaning. A joke is a clever deceit. It leads you on with the promise of one sense – only to ambush you with another sense that makes a non-sense of the first sense. The comic lulls the unwary audience into thinking that ‘order’ means a ‘military com- mand’, and then pounces with a punch line. The pugilist metaphor is telling. Swift and violent body blows accompany the reversal of mean- ing – we feel it in our gut. Comedy is physical and startling. Bang – suddenly it turns out that ‘order’ means a commercial transaction, and not the directive of a general. Having opened up the delicious gap between ordering curtains and ordering soldiers to their death – its curtains for you – the comic then plays merrily with the double meanings of words. The audience is launched on a see-saw between two worlds – civilian and military – as Edmund desperately tries with the only tool at his disposal, savage irony, to avoid the mechanical ballet of death, the miserable hell that was trench warfare during World War I. Such irony is possible because you and I never quite mean what we say we mean. Nor do we ever – quite – mean what we think we mean. Like all other things, words by nature are double and duplicitous. All communication is misunder- standing – and all truth is a lie. I suppose this might offend a moralist; but the problem with moralists is that they cannot see that every good act has a downside and that bad acts are sometimes the necessary corollary of good deeds. Oskar Schindler was one of the rare moral personalities in the morally despicable twentieth century. He was that because he lied on a grand scale. If there was ever an act of redemptive communication, it was Schindler’s audacious dramaturgy of lies. He conned the Nazi brass into believing that he had productive slave labour factories so he could save the Jewish workers on his sacred list. When moralists tell you ‘do not lie’, remember Schindler. This paradox of the liar is well assayed by Bob Dylan when, with the wryness of age, he growls: ‘All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie/ I’m in love with a woman who don’t even appeal to me’ (Dylan 1999). If I pause to think why the pop music of the second half of the twentieth century was so good, I am reminded that it was a glo- rious mimesis of 100, maybe even 1,000, kinds of demotic music that had come before it. When Mick Jagger sings the song about the girl with the ‘Far Away Eyes’ in mock preachy, drawling, camp gospel EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 226EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 226 5/28/10 9:18:56 AM5/28/10 9:18:56 AM 227‘I am not what I am’ 1. Of Jagger, Bloom wrote: ‘In his act he was male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; unencumbered by modesty, he could enter everyone’s dreams, promising to do everything with everyone …’ (Bloom 1988: 78). 2. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, III.1 Olivia: Stay: I prithee, tell me what thou thinkest of me. Viola: That you do think you are not what you are. Olivia: If I think so, I think the same of you. Viola: Then think you right: I am not what I am. Olivia: I would you were as I would have you be! Viola: Would it be better, madam, than I am? I wish it might, for now I am your fool. country tones, he manages to self-consciously wink at his audience, slide between American evangelical white and black music, send up ‘the church of the sacred bleeding heart of Jesus/Located somewhere in Los Angeles, California’, sing reverential even religious country harmonies about someone who cannot find any harmony in their own life, and turn mawkish country sentiment into a secular hymn of salva- tion. When life has become disgusting, the girl with the far away eyes will redeem you (Jagger and Richards 1978). Allan Bloom, who wrote a rather good Swiftian satire of American higher education, com- plained that Jagger was a chameleon (Bloom 1988).1 But that is exactly what Bloom’s own heroes – Plato and Shakespeare – are. That is their genius. They are, as it has been said of Jagger, a hell of a bunch of interesting characters. You never know which one you will meet at which time on which page. What makes this possible is the double nature of everything. The art of the chameleon is the nature of art. The nature of art is mimetic. The human species is comic because it can mimic. It can parody, mock, exaggerate, caricature, lampoon, burlesque, spoof, and satirize. All of these are misrepresentations, and misrepresentation lies at the core of the human ability to represent. Even the most faithful representation is a caricature. Thus faith is a comedy and faithfulness is comic because of the double nature of everything. When I was a young man, herme- neutics, linguistic philosophy and various kinds of ordinary language philosophy were all the rage. Earnest discussion of the poly-semantics of words was mandatory. But Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx could have told the philosophers that everything is poly-semantic – or dou- ble-coded – and not just words. Comedy is corporeal, gestural, and physical – and gestures, motions and objects all come with double meanings. Anything meaningful has a double meaning. This is so because no thing is identical with itself. At the same time, everything has a mean- ing. Every thing has meaning because any thing can be funny. Even mass slaughter can be funny – witness Blackadder – but it takes remark- able comic ability to make it so. We laugh for various reasons – some of them very serious. The condition of the possibility of laughter, though, is singular. Any thing in principle can be funny because all things are at a slight tangent to themselves. This is ultimately because the cosmos – or nature – itself is double-coded, or as the quantum physicists put it: a light wave from one observation standpoint is a light particle from another standpoint. It is in this sense that God is a joker. God is the name for the gap that separates each thing from itself. Everything that exists – exists in a phase-shift. All comedy is about doubling. This is true of comedy both in the cosmic and mundane senses. From the lamest stand-up comedian to the sublime nature of Shakespeare, at the heart of comedy is the dou- bling of human identity. Comedy explores the gap between ‘who we are’ and ‘who we are’, or as the wonderful Viola in Twelfth Night puts it: ‘I am not what I am’ (Twelfth Night, III.1).2 Indeed so – I am not what I am. All of us lead double lives in a world that is double coded – even if some of us, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, do not realize this, and EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 227EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 227 5/28/10 9:18:56 AM5/28/10 9:18:56 AM 228 Peter Murphy end up as the butt of humour. Great human personalities are aware that they are not what they are. They are self-aware. This does not mean that they do not suffer the burden of their double self. Viola’s self-knowledge is tinged with pathos. Her concealment – the drama- turgical disguise of her own self, her playing the role of a boy – brings her close to her love, but at the same time separates her from him – and she knows it. This comic pathos – the pathos of a paradox – redeems Viola from being thought ridiculous or risible. She still gets plenty of laughs – but the kinds of laughs that are due someone who has a dis- tance from their own self. The ability to distance one’s self from one’s self is central to both human self-consciousness and human self-understanding. It is the essential – the higher – task of humour. Yet some human beings have difficulty distancing themselves from their own selves. They are unin- tentionally funny as a result. We laugh at them, rather than with them. They are the ones who are least like Viola and most like Malvolio. They are the upwardly mobile amongst us – you know who you are. They are the ones who are wedded without parody to their brilliant careers. These are the souls who not only pretend to be someone whom they are not – there is nothing remarkable in that – but they also pretend not to be pretending. Most absurd of all, they pretend to themselves that they are not pretending, and so end up being pretentious prats – the typical fate of all social climbers. They cannot see that life is a game, to be enjoyed. ‘I am not what I am’ is a paradox. It is the uncanny truth of those who lead double lives, who are players on the stage of life. All socie- ties have some small aspect of theatricality. All human beings have one foot in nature and one foot in society, and, by default, play society and nature off against each other. Yet there are a small number of societies that do this with a special luminous intensity. These are dramaturgical societies. In the modern world, the first of the great dramaturgical societies was Elizabethan England. The great later inheritor of the spirit of Elizabethan England was the United States. Both the Americans and the English faced a singular option in their history – either dramaturgy or civil war. Both chose both. Both allowed their society to slide into civil war. Both returned from the abyss – and rebuilt themselves as intensely theatrical societies. Both had Puritan and Romantic currents that disavowed dramaturgy in the name of morals and authenticity. Both mastered those currents. We often think of the United States as a Puritan society. There is an element of truth in this of course. But, in a larger sense, America is the offshoot of a society that had begun to stage itself, indeed to stage itself comically. Consequently, America is filled with incongruous characters – with epicurean puritans and bourgeois bohemians. In the nineteenth century, the puritan religion and protestant zeal of America turned itself into something very different – viz., evangelical drama- turgy – and, at exactly the same time, America became besotted with Shakespeare. From its start, America’s evangelical dramaturgy was fiercely musical. In time this musicality mutated from spirituals, hymns and gospel singing into the anti-puritan pleasure-centred headland of EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 228EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 228 5/28/10 9:18:56 AM5/28/10 9:18:56 AM 229‘I am not what I am’ 3. Pronounced ‘Mod-zhe-yev-ska’. rock ’n’ roll. In the 1960s, Englishmen like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards imported this soundtrack of unfathomable ambiguity from America – only to export it again, in various, often very knowing, ways back to America. In so doing, these twentieth century artists reprised, with an added touch of irony, England’s earlier export of Shakespeare to America. Susan Sontag captures something essential about the experience of being In America (1999) with her novelization of the life of the nineteenth-century Polish emigrant actress Helena Modjeska – whose forte was Shakespearean roles.3 It is no wonder, then, that Tom Stoppard has his wonderful Shakespeare in Love (1998) end with Viola heading for the comic-tempest-shore of the New World in the beauti- ful tracking shot that ends the film. I cannot think of Stoppard’s daz- zling screenplay without also thinking of how close in spirit it is to the tradition of American sociology. This is not an obvious point of com- parison I know, but all the more revealing for that. I am struck by the amount of dramaturgical social science that America has produced – most particularly from the 1920s onwards. I am thinking of figures ranging from George Herbert Mead, Kenneth Burke, Hugh Dalziel Duncan and Erving Goffman, to Richard Schechner, Richard Sennett and Jeffrey Alexander. American sociology of the 1960s was domi- nated by the mammoth figure of Talcott Parsons. Parsonian sociology was the sociology of social functions and roles. The world of roles is the world of Violas. I remember, at the time, there was much snorting about this: ‘Role players are inauthentic’ the cry went. Well, yes, they are – that is the point. The better actor a role player is, the less important the original self is to the functioning of personality. ‘Exactly’, the retort came back, ‘so my true self is mutilated by the roles I play’: if ‘I am not what I am’, then I am not being true to my true self. But what self is that exactly – and what exactly is wrong with a doppelgänger self? This question touches on a basic human anxiety. If I play a role, then I do and say things that are not true. If I admit I do that then in some way I seem to be admitting that I am a dirty rotten scoundrel – or, in more flushed terms, I am saying that I am a wicked Machiavellian doing the devil’s work. Now most social actors, even the most accom- plished social actors, the great communicators, do not want to say this – and there is no reason in any case that we would want to turn those selves into scheming reprobates. Nor do we want a world filled with raving lunatics like Shakespeare’s Leontes – for whom ‘all’s true that is mistrusted’ (The Winter’s Tale, II.1). That is simply madness. Still that does not stop all the truth in the world adding up to one big lie either. The reason for this is the paradox of the truth teller. There is the ordi- nary truth of truth claims. This is what I am saying – and I am telling the truth. What I am saying is factually accurate, normatively correct, scrupulously honest, and so on. But human beings also lie by telling the truth. In war, the best camouflage is to leave something in plain sight. In politics, candour is a strategy safely conducted because even the most fulsome statement is selective. Every time we reveal some- thing, we also hide it. We do that consciously and we do it uncon- sciously. We do it cunningly and we do it naively. Courts try to get EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 229EJPC_1.2_art_Murphy_225-236.indd 229 5/28/10 9:18:56 AM5/28/10 9:18:56 AM 230 Peter Murphy around this by asking witnesses to speak ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. But that only works to a certain extent – because everything is double-coded. Even the most honest person mis- represents what they are trying, with pains, to scrupulously represent. The worst witness is the eyewitness. Different from this merry-go-round is dramaturgical truth. It simply takes for granted that human beings hide things with their candour – and reveal things by communicating them indirectly. Dramaturgical truth is the truth of those who think and behave as if the world is a stage. It is the truth of the unreconstructed Elizabethans and dramaturges among us – those who think that everything impor- tant said and done is said and done ‘in role’ in the sense that the Elizabethan Viola/Cesario played a role played by a boy playing a girl playing a boy. When she declared ‘I am not what I am’, she alluded to these multiple identities – and the delicious comic confusion that they create. What is the truth of a boy playing a girl playing a boy? It is the truth of a paradox. It is the truth of a virgin queen. It is the truth of the stoic who when asked ‘what is freedom?’ replies that ‘freedom is the fol- lowing of necessity’. This answer may seem puzzling and enigmatic on first hearing. It may seem somewhat ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ to combine two patently contradictory ideas – those of freedom and necessity – but that is what dramaturgical acts and dramaturgical societies do. They combine male and female, master and servant, old and young, high and low, liberal and conservative, republican and democrat. In a dramaturgical world, boys play girls playing boys – or if you are Tom Stoppard, girls play boys playing girls. Truth in such a world is not spoken directly. It might not even be spoken at all. It is just as likely to be visual or gestural, historical or geographical, as it is verbal or discursive. Dramaturgical truth is not newspaper truth: it is not ideological truth. It is not the truth of a moral or political ‘viewpoint’– God save us from those! Dramaturgical truth is communicated indirectly – via the surreptitious intertwining and oblique overlay of contrary roles, deed and thoughts. It is the truth of pseudonymous works. These are works – as Kierkegaard said of the ones that were attributed to him – where ‘… there is not a single word which is mine. I have no opinion about these works except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning, except as a reader,