And that wonderful sense of blithe containedness at the heart of all humor (bizarre but self-perpetuating, like an escher painting).
Nicola Barker Darkmans
In order to accurately write on the eccentric science of creating other worlds, which necessarily requires an account of doubled description (i.e. the interleaving of both composed and random components), the writing itself must conform to this model and thereby include an other ‘description’ in contrast to itself. It must seek out noise.
Similarly, if communist theory is to adequately descripe its new world, it cannot simply perfect itself from its own propositions, shedding extraneous matter, and arriving at some hypothetical lived moment of clarified statements. On the contrary, the realisation of theory assumes a structural adulteration of its categories by human error.
For reason of its own socialisation, communist writing is now at the juncture where it must bury its own tradition. It must veer off and hunt out the accidental in its essence. The writing that is layered within the writing must perform the world that it describes. It must activate a performance of the overlaying of that deliberate and random material which relate to the same event, i.e. to the creation of other worlds... the writing within the writing may only create its world by re-instigating accidental essence at the centre of mechanistic process. It must depart from itself. It must perform a dogleg.
In offering this little book, the third of its kind to the public, I am glad to take the opportunity of recording the pleasure I have received at the appreciation its predecessors have met with, as attested by their wide circulation, and by the universally kind notices of them from the Press. To have been the means of administering innocent mirth to thousands, may surely be a just motive for satisfaction, and an excuse for grateful expression.... every one of the Rhymes was composed by myself, and every one of the Illustrations drawn by my own hand at the time the verses were made. Moreover, in no portion of these Nonsense drawings have I ever allowed any caricature of private or public persons to appear, and throughout, more care than might be supposed has been given to make the subjects incapable of misinterpretation: "Nonsense," pure and absolute, having been my aim throughout.
Edward Lear Preface to the Third Book of Nonsense
At this point, we are impelled, as it were, to descend (further) into nonsense in order that nonsense might overlay our more coherent arguments with its own descriptions. Nonsense, in moments inappropriately dominated by the logic of instrumentalism, stands as placeholder for the ‘random’. That is not to say it is random, but if we set a place at the table for nonsense, we shall not be so surprised by the arrival of the human (whose own placeholder is the stranger).
Bowing to convention, we can assume that in producing written argument the writer seeks to persuade his readers. The most logically effective proposition is always that set within the frame of nonsense, as nonsense convinces all its readers of what it is. And to be certain that he really has written persuasively, the writer must, as it were, catastrophically lose readers from his arguments. Only those readers who refuse him outright demonstrate an insight into the profundity that may be found at the threshold of what is tolerable. Similarly, communist thought must drive itself to confound practice both at the level of thought, and in the categorical register of communism – if it fails in this, it is not ‘thinking’ generally, and it is not communist ‘thinking’ specifically.
Nonsense is a boundary genre, typically excluded, but if other worlds are to be created, we must allow it, or what it stands in the place of, for what it brings in with it. Nonsense refers both to meaning in rationality, and meaning in human affect – but from outside of these. In its historical moment, the phenomenon of nonsense introjected that affective material of sociality, of social cohesion, which was, in still earlier times, exteriorised in the form of gargoyles and grotesquery. The discursive recourse to nonsense, even in radical discourse, is an expression of the need for flourishing as this occurs between the planned and the unknown – it marks the point before real need is properly articulated, and before that need is headed off, paraphrased, by utilitarian provision. In spite of so-called communism’s ‘material requirements’, as evidenced in productivist ideology, purposelessness is fundamental in the formation of the human community.
In order to bring about the non-intended patterns of other worlds at a third level of recursion, which requires an opening towards purposeless, we must cause an overlaying between the above and the below, the deliberate and the random, the meaningful and the nonsensical, between signal and noise. That which belongs, that which resonates in both registers, as meaning and meaningless, is thereby indicative of a relational subset called meaning-nonsense. This subset, ordinarily excluded in the discourse of instrumentalisation, captures and recycles that material recorded in the encounter at the edge of permissible thought content in those milieus spefically oriented towards worldmaking.
I think human nature is pretty much the same all along.
On the whole perhaps Pussycat nature is the best.
Even so, the relation of nonsense to its referent, nonsense, is socially conditioned, and has shifted over time – nonsense is not a synonym for the random but it may function as a means to positively include it. In its Victorian guise, humorous nonsense separated itself historically from alarming nonsense (of the tragic type: Tom’s a cold ,--O, do de, do de, do de. Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking!) through an effortful assertion of the continence of its tonal register (its self-containedness) – it was blithe but not distracted. However, even within examples of the most light-hearted and determinedly inconsequential nonsense there was a psychopathological residuum relating to the lived context of the writing.
There were always traces of personal and social relations that were not nonsense, but from which nonsense, this blithe humour, functioned as a mode of flight. Nonsense is never less than a deliberate exhalation. The psychological repression required for the reproduction of relations in the period of capital’s formal domination heightened a sense of the absurd – factory discipline supposed a proliferation of written injunctions and memorised regulations which extended into all areas of social life. The structure of nonsense imitates the form of rote, index, litany, principles, argumentation. It does not run up against, but flows around, irrational, fetishistic authority. Nonsense is found in a state of terror – one cannot help, arranged together in formation, for the learning of the lesson, breaking out laughing. Nonsense is thus an expression of the affective wrenching experienced by the individual caught in inhibiting institutionalised environments that are supposedly acting on his behalf.
H was Papa's new Hat;
He wore it on his head;
Outside it was completely black,
But inside it was red.
We now find in the relentless hilarity and its jaunty rhythms a searing melancholy and loss, as if the words were being recited over jerky filmic images of Great War soldiers returning from the front. The nonsense form appeared at that juncture where the conventions of work relations began to seep into everyday life, the period where formal domination by the commodity-form was first generalised as a reproducible social relation. Nonsense thereby recorded the sense of absurd disconnection experienced by those suddenly at a loss before one another in the world. All signposts had been removed. The event of the commodity form as a mediating abstraction was marked by nonsense, abstraction appeared within social relations as a mental block – this was shortly before it became an all-facilitating conduit. In the nonsensical moment, stunted creatures discovered they were unable to say anything, a few years later, they would discover they could say everything. At the nonsense crossroads, they experienced social relations as an infinite regress of exclusions, later these same relations would turn out to be fully enclosed and thus super-connected.
And having failed the first time, for fear of being derided,
I shall never try again or at least I’m not decided,
For we’re all nervous, very, very nervous,
And we’re all nervous at our house in Town.
The overvalued ideas which appear in nonsense writings during the period of formal domination articulate genuine preoccupations but are expressed in a carefully maintained carefree form. The writer of nonsense gives free rein to his worries, but as he is already conditioned to chronic non-reciprocation, he relocates his pained ejaculations into a register that will not offend the empathetically indifferent ear.
To make large drawings nobody will buy--
To paint oil pictures which will never dry--
To write new books which nobody will read--
To drink weak tea, on tough old pigs to feed-
On the contrary, the humorist's pain is transformed into entertainment for those who are unable to acknowledge it without implicating themselves in some subterranean intensity. This tendency in certain men to frivolity, as a defence mechanism, was reinforced by the compensation that they at least, via their dextrous humour, had gained the attention of those who, they were absolutely convinced, would otherwise happily ignore their abject utterings. That which must not be experienced as trauma is thereby converted into fun. Nonsense behaved as cushion to the impact of industrialised meaninglessness, it was a sort of training.
The unskilled worker is the one most deeply degraded by the drill of machines. His work has been sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing there. What the fun fair achieve with its Dodgem cars and other similar amusements is nothing but a taste of the drill to which the unskilled labourer is subjected in the factory.
On some motifs in Baudelaire
Harmless fun is a technical invention, appearing as a corollary of formal domination and engineered according to the general model of industrial revolution. Fun appeared in the places where festivals had already been suppressed. As Europeans were, no doubt, carousing, playing music, writing poetry, preparing for festivals, fomenting revolution, or merely innocently baiting bulls, the industrialised English, these cold fish, were thinking they could out-clever French folk with their silly knees-bent running about advancing behaviour! I wave my private parts at your aunties, you cheesy lot of second hand electric donkey-bottom biters. These bed-wetting types were inventing 'innocent' pass-times in their parlours. Edward Lear is the epitome of this sensibility. Others, like GK Chesterton, and Lewis Carroll, perhaps otherwise comparable to more 'serious' writers, alongside MLR James in equivalent quantity genres, wrote for the parlour from the parlour.
He said, Its awful dull and dreary,
I think I'll go to bed.
Imagine, the city of London, jam-packed with foreign revolutionaries; its streets cramped with houses that lurched unhygenically like dirty, broken English teeth; wherein were hunched, huge, overbearing, bearded bachelors, of immense intelligence and nervous disposition; bizarre contorted scholars, unable to reflect upon lost childhood; confined by tiny over-decorated, coal-heated rooms; bored out of their immense and complex minds by the constraints placed upon their conversing with maiden aunts; and always the portrait of Father, glaring down; stuffing themselves with buttered crumpets; pinning bread and butter flies in glass topped drawers; the rain outside (always the rain); and there they were, furiously writing, Shrimpy, Nimpy, Flimpy, Shrimpy. Jumpy, jimpy, Little shrimp! and thus coding a peculiar nostalgic awareness which it would take the echolocating surrealists to pick up on politically. Something nasty appears in fun but first that something, the metabolisation of a terrible subliminal injury, has to be forcibly disappeared, and thereby suppressed into nonsense.
'There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes...Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power...It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humor as Holderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality.' Adorno and Horkheimer
In the disciplined life, nonsense was the remnant of having once been a screaming infant left in its cot, whose parents would not pick it up, and precisely because it was crying to be picked up. A hidden history of the disciplining of the self is revealed at last in the nonsensical as its tolerable form: it has asked, it has demanded, it has pleaded and it had no right to ask, demand or plead – therefore it was ignored. Nonsense dislocates the ordinary sublimation of demand and counter-demand in everyday discourse and directly reiterates needs but in a register which is so direct and childlike that the expressed yearning becomes obscured.
From the Coast of Coromandel
Did that Lady never go;
On that heap of stones she mourns
For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
On that Coast of Coromandel,
In his jug without a handle
Still she weeps, and daily moans;
On that little heap of stones
To her Dorking Hens she moans,
For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,
For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
Nonsense borders the terrain of meaningful discourse. An eternal torrent of nonsense exists prior to meaning, it is in the child’s charmingly serious babble, it pours upwards as the base-level of noise from which patterns of meaning are extracted. It is an origin. On the other hand, it is also the precipice to which all meaningful communication approaches. Over-invested, over-determined meanings must drift, via rituals of redundancy and tautology, into empty and repetitive formalism. Nonsense is therefore, also an end: dementia, de-patterning, entropy.
There are thus, knowing inclusions of nonsense into the terrain of meaning: shadings, capturings, codings which bend pure nonsense towards a second order representational sadism. In writing nonsense there has to be a sort of forensic dissection of the stuff of affect, a formal awareness of what is not permitted, and a cruelly indifferent pinning of the fragile possibilities of emotional expression. The appearance of the bourgeois ideal of childhood coincided with the awareness of irreducible childlike drives in adults – the stunted man who would not be deflected. Certainly, there were those who were able to turn their childlike aspect to their own advantage, deploying manipulative passive aggression and calculated innocence to pursue adult preoccupations:
He [Harold Skimpole] thought about it for a little while with a highly agreeable and whimsical expression of face, then quite gave it up and said in his most engaging manner, "You know what a child I am. Why surprised?"
But more often, nonsense seeks merely to preserve itself as a closed record, as a continuous recycling of the needs that have not been met. It never advances beyond itself, and ruthlessly patrols its borders, sabotaging all hidden meanings. Even so, perversely perhaps, nonsense (like meaning) cannot be intended to remain itself, the grammar of nonsense ensures that it directly states its function. It assumes a strict hierarchy of communication from which it is a derivative; the right to speech, and the mode in which each may appropriately speak, is distributed socially according to status. The fool is both privileged and outcast.
But they never came back,
They never came back,
They never came back.
They never came back to me.
Within abstractly mediated social relations, the discourse appropriate to need, the discourse which is used as a means for communicating need within interpersonal relations, becomes separated from need itself and is transformed into a disciplinary goad, a mortification of both that which cannot now be communicated (because the feelings in question are structurally not worth communicating) and of the secondary anxiety which this sense of the inexpressibility of feelings generates. The person who experiences his own needs as superfluous in relation to others thus establishes a register by which he communicates this sense of exclusion in terms of exaggerated and reinforcing superfluity, thereby instigating a vicious spiral of irrelevance to, and armouring against, others.
And now each night, and all night long,
Over those plains still roams the Dong;
And above the wail of the Chimp and Snipe
You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe,
While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain,
To meet with his Jumbly Girl again;
Lonely and wild, all night he goes,
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
I must stop now, as the little gold watch
said when the fat blue-beetle got into his inside.
