When the Hands Come Away

A mother covers her face with both hands. The baby watches the hands and makes no sound. The hands come away, the face is back, and the baby laughs out loud. Cover again, uncover again, laugh again. This is peek-a-boo, and nearly every household has played it.

For the Laughter Series this laugh is a problem. The Overview holds that laughter is an expression of the power of judgment, yet on the mapping of SAE’s psychoanalysis series the subject sits at 13DD, the position that can carry out negation reflexively; an infant of six to eight months is at 12DD, where the law of prediction is at work but the predictor does not know that it is a predictor, what Psychoanalysis I calls the me-without-self. What does laughter without subjectivity count as?

Two answers go too far. One over-claims: it certifies infant laughter outright as judgment. Then judgment would have no owner; and the judgment in laughter on a misjudgment, which can be negated afterwards by oneself, would have no one to negate it, since 12DD has no subject able to negate its own negation. The other under-claims: it hands the laughter of this stretch over to the body, or to Kant’s expectation “transformed into nothing.” Laughter without a self looks most like a bodily affair, and this is exactly where Kant’s reading has the upper hand. But if the infant’s laugh tracks a definite relation, and not merely the strength of a stimulus, it deserves to be discussed as a phenomenon that tracks a relation.

The first paper of the Laughter Series takes a middle path and registers the laughter of this stretch as “laughter as tendency.” “Tendency is a cell that the Laughter Series sets up in its own right.” It means that “part of the structure of construct and remainder has already appeared, and attention has already come to rest on the remainder, but this judgment does not yet have an owner who knows that it is the one judging.”

Out of Sight, Still There

SAE’s paper on education fixes peek-a-boo as the training device of 12DD: gone, back, gone, back, and from this the infant builds prediction. Its timeline puts the game in the “practicing prediction” column at six to eight months. The prediction the infant builds from it is “she will come back.”

Taken apart by the Overview’s formula, peek-a-boo has three components. The construct is perception’s “out of sight”: the face is covered and does not appear in view at this moment, and this discrimination is not itself wrong; it belongs to the perceptual layer, close to 10DD. The remainder is “still there”: not appearing in view at this moment, and still being there and going to come back, can be true together; what perception’s “out of sight” has not taken in is exactly this. What catches the remainder is 12DD prediction, which tracks the face’s persistence and return.

Two present moments must be kept apart. While the face is covered, perception’s “out of sight” holds at that moment and prediction is already tracking “still there”; the construct is still valid and nothing is damaged. Once the hands come away, the face is back; the perceptual state of the moment just past is carried into the present by memory, the construct is still present, and prediction has caught “still there.” Both moments can carry a laugh. Attention rests on “still there,” not on “out of sight”; if attention stays on “out of sight,” what comes out is not laughter but weeping.

Two things must not be over-read. First, this reading explains where the remainder comes from; it does not infer backwards from the laugh that the infant holds a false belief that “the face no longer exists.” Second, there is no reflexive look back at “I didn’t see a moment ago.” 12DD has no subject that knows it has seen; what is caught is the remainder of the perceptual construct, not the laugher’s own not-having-seen. So the Overview’s seeing grid, which arranges laughter by who sees and who doesn’t, does not yet apply here.

A Different Face

Is the infant really laughing at “the same face back in the same place”? Parrott and Gleitman (1989) studied “trick” trials of peek-a-boo. According to the journal abstract, when six- to eight-month-old infants watched peek-a-boo, they smiled less if a different adult came back, or if the adult reappeared in a different place. This fits with infants’ expectations tracking identity and location.

The evidence serves two purposes. First, the infant’s laugh already follows a relation: the same face, coming back in the same place. So tendency has an object that can be stated, and visible behavioural markers: change the person or the place, and the smiling falls off. In the paper’s words: “So it is not mere lingering and exploration, but a rudiment that can be pointed out.” Second, the “suddenness” of the Overview cannot be read as the size of a surprise. The trick rounds were more unexpected, yet they drew no more smiling.

The paper is restrained about this evidence: it has checked only the journal abstract, and what is recorded is a difference in smiling; the full text’s method, scales and statistics have not been checked, and a count of smiles is not the same as what the series calls inner laughter. Reading this tracking as the relation of construct and remainder is the paper’s further reading, and other mechanisms cannot yet be ruled out on this basis.

Leaving, Coming Back

The education paper also says that the marker of the onset of 12DD is separation anxiety: the infant weeps on hearing its mother’s footsteps recede, not from pain, not from hunger, but because it predicts “mama is leaving.” That paper does not discuss it together with peek-a-boo; here the Laughter paper offers an inference.

Separation anxiety and the laugh of peek-a-boo are two situations in which one and the same predictive capacity takes part, with different contents: on one side “leaving,” on the other “coming back.” What can be compared is focus. In peek-a-boo attention rests on the remainder “still there,” and the infant laughs; when the mother really leaves, attention stays on the loss of the construct, and the infant weeps. The Overview says weeping focuses on the construct and laughter on the remainder; the distinction can already be seen at 12DD. If the inference holds, it has a testable consequence: in one and the same infant, the laugh of peek-a-boo and the weeping of separation should appear in roughly the same developmental window, and change as the same predictive capacity stabilizes. The paper has not checked the relevant studies and registers this only as an inference.

Why is 11DD folded into this paper? Sroufe and Wunsch (1972) traced laughter through the first year of life. According to its bibliographic record and secondhand accounts, the earliest laughter appears at around four months, elicited at first mostly by touch and fairly strong sounds; by around one year, more and more by incongruity in visual and social situations. The early laughter directly elicited by touch and strong sounds belongs to 10DD perceptual laughter; the part elicited by familiar games and nursery rhymes already depends on memory.

A familiar nursery rhyme reaches a certain line, a “here it comes ... got you!” game reaches a certain step, and the infant laughs. That “certain line,” that “certain step,” is a familiar thing supplied by memory; without it there would be no construct for “still there” to complete. So the paper’s reason is this: memory supplies the material of the construct, and prediction catches the construct’s remainder; in the earliest laughter as tendency both are already present together. Psychoanalysis I registers what lies below 12DD as a lower-bound remainder; the Laughter Series follows the grouping of Aesthetics Ray 9 (11DD+12DD) and folds 11DD in, and the paper notes the difference. What 11DD contributes to tendency is the paper’s reading, and the developmental research it relies on is still to be checked.

Not Really a Bite

In rough-and-tumble play, the pouncing, nipping and rolling all look like a fight. In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955) Bateson gives a famous analysis: the nip in play denotes the bite, yet does not denote what the bite would denote. In the Laughter Series’ terms, rough-and-tumble play is a construct that openly carries its own remainder: the shape of attack is there, the remainder “not really an attack” is there too, and both parties carry it in their movements. The laughter of animals at play can be read from here: construct and remainder are both present, and no one loses. Once the play crosses the line, “not an attack” no longer holds, and the laughter usually stops and gives way to other responses. This is the paper’s reading, not offered as empirical confirmation.

Such laughter is registered as tendency for the same reason as infant laughter: there is a construct, a remainder and the tracking of the remainder, but no owner who knows that it is the one judging. Whether the play vocalizations of different species belong to one class must be checked species by species and task by task; layer cannot be presumed from the name “laughter” or a similarity of sound. Chimpanzees are a separate case. They pass the mirror self-recognition test (Gallup 1970); Call and Tomasello’s 2008 review holds that there is reliable evidence that they understand others’ goals, intentions, perception and knowledge, and as yet no evidence that they understand false beliefs. On the series’ present reading, mirror self-recognition is an early sign that 13DD is available, and chimpanzees have entered the early stage of 13DD. Psychoanalysis I lists chimpanzee deception as an emergence of 12DD; the two await alignment, and the paper does not rewrite the upstream paper on its behalf.

When children play hide-and-seek, the one hiding often giggles. The seeker’s construct of “searching” has a remainder, and it is me: right here, and he can’t find me. This is the reverse of peek-a-boo: “in peek-a-boo the remainder comes back before my eyes; in hide-and-seek I am the remainder that has hidden.” Very young children often cover their own eyes and think they are well hidden. One reading is that “what the other sees is not the same as what I see” has not yet been established; some research, not yet checked, holds instead that children think hiding requires the two parties not to look each other in the eye. The paper rests weight on neither reading.

Is the giggle in hide-and-seek sly laughter? The judgment of sly laughter, “I see, he does not,” requires representing the other’s present not-knowing as the state of another subject, that is, the distinction between subject and other. The threshold lies in this structure, so the judgment of sly laughter comes at the earliest at 13DD. Mirror self-recognition and knowledge access (whoever hasn’t seen doesn’t know) are only signs that the structure is available; only waiting for the other to believe something false, as Nasreddin does in the borrowed-pot story of the third essay, requires an understanding of false belief, which comes at around four. The specific ages are not load-bearing. Before this structure is available, the giggle in hide-and-seek tracks the relation “he hasn’t found me yet” and is registered as a tendency of the sly-laughter structure. As for “holding it back,” an act done with laughter, that comes only once there is purpose, and is left to the third paper.

Before the Hand Touches

Tickling makes people laugh. The paper treats the laughter of tickling in two phases, and the ground for the boundary must first be made clear. “External stimulus” cannot serve: the occasion of peek-a-boo is also made by an adult, the occasion of a joke by someone else, and if “coming from outside” were the boundary, the laughter as tendency of this paper would be excluded too. “Whether there is prediction” cannot serve either. The study by Blakemore, Wolpert and Frith (1998) shows that when people tickle themselves the sensation is weaker, because the brain uses the motor command to compute the sensory consequences of one’s own movement in advance and cancels them. This shows that the perceptual layer has a kind of prediction of its own, but supplies no layer assignment; and when someone else tickles you, you have precisely no movement of your own to predict from.

The paper’s ground is what the prediction is directed at. The anticipatory phase: the hand has not yet touched, and the child is already laughing. What is predicted is another person’s movement, “here it comes,” directed at objects and relations in the world: a 12DD tendency. The “here it comes ... got you!” game above is exactly this phase. The contact phase: the laugh after the touch is a response to touch itself; it belongs to 10DD perceptual laughter and lies outside the scope.

The paper says plainly that this boundary is a candidate account, not a completed structural proof. One’s own movement and touch are also in the world; when another person tickles, “who will touch me, and when” likewise involves objects and relations. So the line is not drawn by “in the body or in the external world,” but case by case: is what is at work the correction for sensory consequences, or the sustained tracking of an object across occlusion and across time?

The boundary is drawn by the layer at which this laugh occurs, not by who the laugher is. When an adult is tickled, what is faced in the laugh at the moment of contact, what activates the layer, is touch; this laugh is still at 10DD, and it does not become a judgment because the laugher stands at 13DD or above in other matters.

Still Missing an Owner

“Tendency is not judgment: it has no owner, no reflexivity, and there is no question yet of its being questioned.” No owner: at 12DD prediction is at work, but the predictor does not know it is a predictor; the relation of construct and remainder is caught, but there is no subject who knows “it is I who judge” to claim it. No reflexivity: if in peek-a-boo a different person comes back and the infant smiles less, this is not the correction of a misjudgment; the tendency was simply never headed there, and the category “laughter on a misjudgment” does not apply. No question of being questioned: an infant laughing along with adults may be the contagion of tendency, but it does not yet amount to asking “What are you all laughing at?”

What about Kant’s expectation “transformed into nothing”? At 12DD this reading is at its most attractive: there is no subject here, and laughter looks most like a bodily affair. All the paper can say is that tendency tracks a definite relation: change the person or the place, and the smiling falls off. This supports discussing tendency as a phenomenon that tracks a relation, and it constrains pure-intensity accounts that look only at the strength of a stimulus. Whether it conflicts with Kant cannot be settled merely by “there is an object.” §54 already has a play of representations and thoughts; the transformation into nothing speaks of the frustration of a strained expectation, not of there being no face and no relation in the event. A comparison needs a joint definition on the same event and the same expected content; until then, the paper does not declare this a counterexample to §54. Nor are bodily involvement and the tracking of a relation an either-or.

If tendency is not judgment, why keep it within the scope? Because the structure of construct and remainder begins here. At 12DD the formula already has part of its structural material: the construct, perception’s “out of sight”; the remainder, “still there”; and focus on the remainder, laughter rather than weeping. What is still missing is not only an owner to claim it; the reflexive gap between seeing and not having seen has not appeared either. So the paper says: “This paper is therefore the starting point of the Laughter Series: it shows what the laughter of judgment grows out of.”

Once more the mother takes her hands away, and once more the baby laughs. In that laugh “out of sight” and “still there” are present together, and no one loses. The two missing things, an owner who knows that it is he who judges and a look back at what he himself had not seen a moment ago, appear only at 13DD. That is where the next essay begins.