The One Who Has Just Come In

A roomful of people bursts out laughing. Someone who has just come in, not yet knowing what they are laughing at, laughs along. A moment later he asks: “What are you laughing at?”

What was he laughing at? Not at what the others were laughing at; he has not seen it yet. The construct he laughs at is his own present understanding, and it has a remainder: the thing the others have seen and he has not. What he sees is precisely that he himself stands on the side of not having seen. The others laugh at something; he laughs at his not having seen it. For this he must be able to take his own not-seeing as an object. An infant laughing along with adults may also be contagion, but it is only the tendency of 12DD: it cannot see its own “not having seen.”

This is the dividing line that the second paper of the Laughter Series, “This Judgment Is Mine,” is about. SAE’s psychoanalysis series defines 13DD as self-without-purpose: self-awareness has emerged, and the chisel-construct cycle is for the first time seen by itself, but there is no direction yet. The product of its chisel is self-reference, “it is I who am doing these things”; its remainder is one’s own finitude. The Laughter Series fixes the subject here: the position that can carry out negation reflexively, that can negate its own negation. At 12DD a failed prediction is also a negation, only no one knows it is his own negation. At 13DD negation is recognized for the first time as one’s own, and so can turn round and negate one’s own earlier negation.

With this, laughter gains four new things. The construct can be my own, and I can point out its remainder: self-mockery. The not-seeing can be my own: contagious laughter. The judgment can be retracted: the laugh on a misjudgment can be corrected afterwards. Someone else’s construct can be seen as a construct: the onlooker’s laughter of a reader who sees the man of Chu trapped in his. The Overview’s seeing grid applies only from this layer on: 12DD has no subject who knows “I have seen” or “I have not seen”; 13DD has.

Laughter Does Not Decide

Before the four, a preliminary clarification. How is reflexive negation related to laughter? The paper’s answer: laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes. After the laugh, the construct may carry on, may be amended, or may have been abandoned long ago; whether it stays or goes the subject judges separately, and this laugh does not settle it.

Reflexive negation can negate a construct’s validity, my own earlier reading included. It can come before the laugh, as when one mocks a plan one dropped long ago; after the laugh, as when a laugh on a misjudgment is later retracted; or alongside it, as in “I actually thought that, just now.” But what laughter judges is not this negation. It judges only that this construct is before one’s eyes at this moment, and still has such a remainder.

Here too lies the line between the series and Hurley, Dennett and Adams, by a provisional comparison based on existing accounts of their book: they tie laughter to whether a belief stays or goes, detecting it, clearing it, and paying out a reward. The series ties laughter not to staying or going but to the remainder alone. The boundary is not whether the construct falls, but where the laugh lands. This runs through everything below, and matters most for self-mockery.

After Xanthippe’s Thunder

The construct in self-mockery is one’s own: a plan of one’s own, an image of oneself, an understanding of one’s situation. The self-mocker sees that this construct still has such a remainder, and points it out in public. The plan may still be in place or may have been dropped long ago; that has nothing to do with this laugh. “So self-mockery is not self-negation but self-pointing-out.”

Diogenes Laertius records a saying of Socrates with a documented source. Xanthippe first scolded him and then threw water over him, and Socrates said: “Did I not say that after Xanthippe’s thunder would come rain?” The text records only the remark, not any laughter; what the paper takes from it is the structure of self-mockery. His composure is the construct; being drenched is the remainder; both are in view at once, and he put the remainder into words.

A more widely circulated line is also attributed to Socrates: marry a good wife and you will be happy; marry a bad one and you will become a philosopher. No reliable original source has been verified, and the paper takes only its structure. Socrates laughs at his own construct, but the remainder he points to lies in the listener’s construct too: “a good life comes from good circumstances,” and setbacks are mere losses. That difficulty and setback give rise to thought is exactly the point this construct has not taken in. Pointing with oneself as the target has two advantages. The only one put on display is himself; the listener need not first become the one laughed at. And the lesson is not spelled out: “difficulty gives rise to thought,” stated outright, would become instruction; he only laughs at himself, and the listener has the chance to understand on his own. This is one way teasing comes close to cultivation.

But this is only a possibility, not a guarantee. A teacher who says before the class “even a dimwit like me has got it” makes himself the target, yet may still drive a student who has not got it into embarrassment. Self-mockery makes room for the listener; whether the room is really left depends on whether the other is free not to laugh, and free to disagree, without being penalized.

Self-mockery has a neighbour at 13DD. SAE’s psychoanalysis series places punitive self-directed guilt in the 13DD swamp: “I am not good enough,” “everything I do is wrong”; the subject is present, but judges itself without direction. Self-mockery has the same object, one’s own construct, but the opposite focus. Self-judgment focuses on the construct, and its failure is chewed over again and again; self-mockery focuses on the remainder, the construct’s failure is seen as a remainder, and so one can laugh. Self-awareness can become a swamp, the more one observes the more anxious one grows; self-mockery is another outlet for the same self-observation. It does not leave the swamp by gaining a direction, which is the business of 14DD; it does not solve the problem of direction, but it may loosen repeated self-punishment for a time. What one’s relation to oneself is after the laugh must still be looked at separately.

The Clue May Be Wrong

Back to the one who came in late. Others’ laughter is a fallible clue; it cannot by itself certify what anyone has seen. Outward laughter can be empty: polite laughter, and laughter that merely accommodates the conversation, have the expression without the judgment. So when he takes the others’ laughter to mean “they have seen something,” that is an inference. If the inference is wrong, the “my not having seen” he is laughing at may have had nothing there to be seen.

Canned laughter has to be handled by its conditions. A laugh track may have recorded real laughter, or may be merely dubbed in; knowing it is a recording does not automatically rule out taking it as a clue that others once saw something. Only if a viewer mistakes dubbed-in sound, with no judgment behind it, for the reaction of others who saw the same remainder, and the mistake enters his own laugh, is it a laugh on a misjudgment. The route itself shows that there is judgment in contagious laughter: if it were mere imitation of a sound, there would be nothing to be fooled about.

So “What are you laughing at?” is the most natural thing for him to say. The question links contagious laughter to the Overview’s seventh thesis: what laughter expects of others is openness to being questioned. Under the way of being questioned that the series advocates, he takes the others’ laughter seriously while standing ready to be told: either what they saw, so that he can judge again, or that it was nothing really, so that he takes back the judgment of the laugh he just laughed.

The Overview offered a candidate explanation for why a crowd laughs more readily: “whom one is laughing at” is sometimes many-layered. Contagious laughter adds another layer: in a crowd I may not only see together with everyone, but may first see that I have not seen. Both are judgments, both within the scope; only the part where one laughs along merely on hearing laughter, without judging, falls among the exclusions.

“That Isn’t Funny”

The Overview said that cannot-not follows the judgment, not its correctness. The paper gives a hypothetical: someone who has believed a rumour takes another person’s action as absurd and laughs; later he learns the facts were otherwise, and the action had a different reason. The laugh has already happened, but the judgment was wrong.

Misjudgments have several sources. First, the remainder laughed at is invented: in a joke that runs on a stereotype, the construct has been slipped in by the teller himself, and the group laughed at does not have that remainder. Second, the clue is wrong: the canned laughter above. Third, the reading of the construct is wrong: the person in the joke never had the expectation you assumed. In all three the laughter arises just the same, so laughter cannot be used to prove that one has judged correctly.

So “That isn’t funny” is an objection with content. Often it is saying: that remainder does not exist, or the construct being laughed at is one you fitted onto someone else. “That people argue over whether a joke is funny is itself a sign that laughter belongs to judgment.”

At 12DD tendency admits of no misjudgment. At 13DD the subject can negate its own negation, and so can take back the judgment of the laugh it has just laughed: “I misread that just now; it isn’t funny.” Taking it back is the business of reflexive negation, not of that laugh. Two overstatements must be guarded against. Being able to correct does not mean always correcting: many laughs on a misjudgment are never taken back. Nor does it mean the laugh was thereby justified: a laugh can be both a real laugh and a wrong judgment. “What reflexivity provides is the possibility of correction, not a guarantee for the laughter.”

When a laugh on a misjudgment is taken back, embarrassment often comes with it. At that moment attention has turned back to one’s own construct, the reading of a moment ago, and to its failure; so one no longer laughs but feels embarrassed or apologetic. If at that moment one can see one’s own misjudgment too as a remainder and focus on it, one laughs at oneself, and we are back at self-mockery: “I actually thought that, just now.” The same retraction can land on embarrassment or on self-mockery; the difference, again, is where attention lands.

The Boat Had Moved On

The Lüshi Chunqiu, in the chapter “Examining the Present,” tells this: “A man of Chu was crossing the river when his sword fell from the boat into the water. At once he carved a mark on the boat, saying, ‘This is where my sword fell.’ When the boat stopped, he went into the water from the place he had marked to look for it. The boat had moved on, but the sword had not.” The man of Chu’s construct locates the sword, which did not travel with the boat, by a notch that does. This construct still has such a remainder: the boat has moved. The reader sees it; the man of Chu does not. The text records no one laughing; the one who laughs is the reader.

Of the same kind is the man who covered his ears to steal a bell; in the original, the chapter “Knowing Oneself” of the same book, it is a great bronze bell. Too big to carry off, he meant to smash it and take it in pieces; at the first blow it rang out, and, afraid that others would hear and come to take it from him, he hastily covered his own ears. His construct is “if I cannot hear it, no one else can either”; the remainder is other people’s ears. Very young children often cover their own eyes and think they are hidden (how to read this is disputed); the bell thief looks like the adult version, a grown man trapped in a child’s position. One of the Nasreddin stories belongs here too: he lost his key inside the house, but went to look for it under the streetlamp, because it was light there.

These are onlooker’s laughter: seeing another trapped in a construct, seeing that construct’s remainder, without comparing oneself with him. Kant’s Indian is its touchstone, since Kant says outright that we laugh not because we think ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man. If comparison comes in, “I’m certainly cleverer than the man of Chu,” one’s own purpose, self-elevation, has entered the construct laughed at; that is the comparative laughter of the third paper, what Hobbes gives as the second cause. Onlooker’s laughter requires seeing another’s construct as a construct, that is, knowing that his way of grasping differs from mine; to see that the man of Chu has it wrong requires understanding false belief, which comes at around four. The paper places onlooker’s laughter at 13DD, as a candidate.

Within one person, suddenness has an example in a Chinese folk saying passed around without punctuation, which parses two ways. One way it reads: “A rainy day, a day for keeping guests; will you keep me? Keep you I will!” The other: “The rainy day keeps the guest; heaven keeps you, I do not.” The reader goes along with one parsing, suddenly finds the other, and laughs. The construct is the reader’s own parsing; the remainder is the other parsing. Both hold; “still” reaches the layer of validity; no one loses, and no one is harmed. The gap lies within one person and closes in an instant: the one who had not seen is oneself a moment before.

This is also the shared example the Overview chose for comparison with Hurley and his co-authors. How their framework would handle it, the paper does not answer on the book’s behalf: what gets revised may be the premature commitment “there is only this one reading,” or something else. On the series’ side, both parsings are in view, and laughter does not decide whether either stays or goes.

Irony and the Mechanical

In the dialogues Socrates professes ignorance and only asks questions, letting the other walk step by step into his own perplexity. In the seeing grid this is a sustained “I see, the other does not”: Socrates has seen the remainder of the other’s construct but does not spell it out. It has two components, belonging to two papers. One is the posture of self-mockery, “I know nothing,” setting himself out in plain view; that belongs here. The other is holding back and pointing by asking; that is already doing things with laughter, and belongs to the third paper. Whether irony becomes cultivation must be tested passage by passage: if the other has no room to disagree, holding back can also become oppression.

Schopenhauer describes irony as jest hidden behind seriousness, beginning in seriousness and ending in a smile, and his example is precisely Socrates feigning agreement with Hippias and others until the outcome leaves them perplexed. The description catches irony’s temporal structure, a sustained interval whose end point lies with the other. The disagreement is the Overview’s: for him laughter is the outcome of a contest won by intuition over the concept; for the series laughter does not judge victory or defeat, and the end point of irony need not be the defeat of the other’s construct. It may also be that the other sees the remainder himself, and he and Socrates each laugh.

Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Irony, characterizes Socratic irony as infinite absolute negativity; the paper cites this from memory, the original still to be checked. If so, irony comes very close to 13DD reflexive negation: both are a negation in no hurry to posit anything. But the difference is not whether the construct is still there. Irony suspends existing constructs, and suspension does not mean they are no longer in view. The difference is that irony’s negativity is an attitude toward constructs that makes negation its business, whereas laughter, which does not decide whether a construct stays or goes, does not make negation its business. One can draw on Kierkegaard to show the power of reflexive negation, but not to account for laughter.

Bergson, in Laughter, says the laughable is something mechanical encrusted on the living; his typical example is a person carrying out an old habitual movement when the situation has already changed. Such cases can be set beside the layer of “still in use, no longer valid”: the construct keeps running after the situation has changed. What is set side by side are cases, not a claim that Bergson’s whole theory is a special case of the series. He also takes laughter as society’s correction of rigidity; that function the series hands to the third paper’s “doing things with laughter,” and keeps out of the judgment of laughter itself.

At 13DD laughter has an owner: this judgment is mine. Because the subject can carry out negation reflexively, it can point out the remainder of its own construct, see its own not-having-seen, take back the judgment of its own mistaken laugh, and see another’s construct as a construct. One thread runs through all of them: laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes. Taking back, amending, abandoning are the business of reflexive negation, and are not in the laugh. When one’s own purpose enters the construct laughed at, laughter has reached 14DD.