LEWIS CARROLL & THE ALICE BOOKS
Born 1832, Lewis Carroll taught mathematics and logic at Christ Church College at Oxford from college there (1851) to his death (1898). He wrote the Alice books for Alice and her sisters as well as other children who he enjoyed playing with and having conversations. He liked to try to teach kids, especially girls, math and chess. He hated children growing up, because they stopped being innocent and started being deceitful and hypocritical like the adults they imitated.
He was especially fond of children, particularly little girls (which doesn’t come out right no matter how you say it). This became an issue in the 1930s, where in America in anti-pornography by mail conservative moral craze he was labeled a pedophile. Freudian readings of the texts had flourished by this time, and Carroll did not help himself with his photography of children or his relationship to the real Alice, Alice Liddell (the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College). It is thought today by scholars that the family broke contact because Carroll asked for Alice’s hand but he was not noble enough.
Many have tried to crack his books for their symbolism, trying to find the essential meaning underneath. Some have said that his books are merely political commentary, some say it is making fun of the history of mathematics and logic. Others say that there is no meaning at all, but it is simply nonsense. There are things there that are still hiding, and today we look for logic and its puzzles in his nonsensical humor, but listening to late Wittgenstein we likely will not find some particular rule or essential symbolism underneath that solves the text.
There are repeated themes of nonsense, dream, and parody in the Alice books. Carroll took Logic, Nursery Rhymes, Lessons, Hierarchies and he warped and reversed them in conversations between Alice and her dream companions with hilarious consequences. Alice is constantly reciting her rhymes she is taught, hands folded, but strange tales come out. This is paralleled by having ideals and rules but living in the all too human world. It mocks the way that we are hypocritical and irrational while following rules, standards and ideals while we are in conversation and games of life with others.
Carroll was fascinated by reversals, playing music boxes backwards to hear “music standing on its head”. Scholars have noted that he was fascinated not by what worked but the puzzle cases, the problems and mysteries. The best political example: Carroll fascinated by elite kids speaking to servants as kids. An example from Looking Glass: Tweedledee tells Alice she is just a dream character, then stop crying as those tears aren’t real…but then he is a dream and his being upset with her is not real either. Alice in beginning of LG says that she could only tell if lg world has a fire if there is smoke, but it could be deceptive set up. If we are kind to someone else who we get something from, we see it as genuine, but if that person is nice to us before getting something we could see it as a smoke screen, as not genuine but deception. Is this real or not? Likely it is both mixed together, seen from two different and opposite perspectives.
In many ways, the imagination is the same as yet opposite to reality. For example, consider the horse, unicorn example we had with Avicenna, marking the turn to modern thought considering mental objects and consciousness. The being of a unicorn is the same as the being of a real horse in the sense that each is one thing, really so. However, one can always have a unicorn whenever one wants. One starts thinking, an activity, and there is a unicorn, whereas if there is not a horse you have to go find one so you can passively just have it whether you are thinking about it or not. (Consider the red queen, who Alice has to approach going backward and running as fast as they can just to stay in place). Mental objects are ideal, just what they are, while real objects are always imperfect and temporary. Remember that in ancient world cosmology, the real world is often the fake and temporary world compared to the hidden world, and in modern science and logic the things themselves are imperfect compared to the rules and patterns of behavior.
There are many quotes from the books on logic that Lewis Carroll wrote that support a cynical view of logic, philosophy and science as little more than a dream, a dream which makes life itself less than the ideal:
Studying Logic, “will give you clearness of thought – the ability to see your way through a puzzle – the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form – and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art”. (p xvii)
“And so you think, do you, that the chief use of Logic in real life is to deduce Conclusions from workable Premises, and to satisfy yourself that the Conclusions deduced by other people are correct? I only wish it were! Society would be much less liable to panics and other delusions and political life especially would be a totally different thing, if even a majority of the arguments that are scattered broadcast over the world were correct! But it is all the other way , I fear. For one workable pair of premises (I mean a pair that lead to a logical conclusion) that you meet with in reading your newspaper or magazine, you will probably find five that lead to no Conclusion at all; and, even when the Premises are workable, for one instance, where the writer draws a correct conclusion, there are probably ten where he draws an incorrect one.” (p 32)
“The Logicians…speak of the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it…If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall always mean ‘white’ and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’, I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.” (p 165-166)
“You will find these seven words – proposition, attribute, term, subject, predicate, particular, universal – charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have ever studied Logic. Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and your friend will go away deeply impressed – ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.”
If you go through the answers to his syllogism puzzles, you find strange final answers:
“No riddles that interest me can be solved”…“No lobsters are unreasonable”…”No Act of Parliament is amusing”…”Some caterpillars are not eloquent”…”Generals do not write poetry”…”Some savage animals do not drink coffee”…and, the only genuine drug reference I have found in spite of the 60s and 70s counter-cultural claims, “Opium eaters do not wear white kid gloves”.
Sylvie and Bruno Limerick (note the many types of non-being)
He thought he saw a rattlesnake that spoke to him in Greek.
He looked again and found it was the middle of next week.
What a pity it is, he sighed and said, that it can hardly speak.
THE ALICE BOOKS
Alice travels to wonderland and through the looking glass by dreaming. In both places she encounters characters that are trapped in their own perspectives/reasoning such that they are nonsensical to Alice and Alice is nonsensical to them. The Cheshire cat explains this with his comparison of cats and dogs. We have to focus on particular parts due to time, but we will go in order that they appear in the two books.
Alice in Wonderland
This was first called Alice’s Adventures Underground, but Carroll changed the title. In this book Alice falls into a dream and believes she is going underground. In the second book she falls into a dream and thinks she is going through the mirror. Both these are metaphors for going into the mind, logical reasoning and imagination together as thought.
Alice is thinking about whether or not to make a daisy chain when she (unknown to her or the reader until the end) falls asleep. She then sees the white rabbit, fascinating because he is both animal and human, like the human being as both animal body and human mind with reason, imagination, and memory. She follows the white rabbit until she falls down the rabbit hole, just like she followed her thought until she fell asleep and into a dream world.
Alice passes all sorts of empty shelves with jars and labels, passing pictures and maps on the walls. All of these things are containers and images, the abstractions of reason and memory but not real things that they hold and represent. Alice thinks that she will fall through the earth and meet people called Antipathies who walk on their hands upside-down. Notice the reversal of the real by reason and imagination.
She falls into an underground place that becomes a formal banquet hall. Here we have the small door to the garden, and the golden key on the glass table. This is somewhat like the square of opposition, the relationship between universal and particular. When Alice is big, she can reach the key on the table. When we are in the mind universalizing things and saying ‘All xs are ys’ we have the key to judging things and thinking about them in the abstract, but when we are faced with the particular things of the real world, and we only have x is some y and some not y, we no longer can reach the golden key on the slippery glass table (like Early Witt’s truth tables and Later criticism of these as slippery ice). When we think about someone or ourselves, it is easy to say totally bad or good, but when we are faced with the person or being ourselves it is hard to have total ‘All or None’ judgments . Alice will get to this garden later, but she will find it is filled with the Queen who keeps screaming for executions and a bunch of animals being used in a court game of croquet.
Throughout this, Alice is questioning whether or not she is Mabel because she no longer knows the things she does. This is the classic paradox of identity that philosophers today in American Analytics argue about. Remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment and Descartes’ deceiving demon thought experiment. Both said that all the qualities and limbs can be denied, but self-consciousness, the oneness of the presence of the self and whole, can’t be denied. While we think it is absurd that Alice could suspect she is Mabel now, soon after this she is called ‘Mary Ann’ by the white Rabbit, who thinks that she is her servant (Mary Ann was a common name for maids in Victorian England), and Alice responds as if she is Mary Ann. When she enters the house on the white rabbit’s orders, she is worried that she will meet the real Mary Ann. So maybe she was not so crazy in wondering if she was Mabel.
When she encounters the Pigeon, the Pigeon says that if Alice has a long neck, and has eaten eggs, then she must be a serpent and therefore a threat to the eggs in her nest. Alice replies, ‘I am not a serpent, I am a little girl’ (sic) to which the Pigeon replies that if little girls eat eggs like serpents, then they must be some kind of serpent. Notice that the Pigeon is using syllogistic, deductive reasoning here. The problem is that the world is complex and simple rules like ‘if it eats eggs (x) then it is a serpent (y)’ both make sense to the pigeon, and we can understand how and follow the reasoning, but at the same time are nonsense and simply wrong to Alice and the reader.
Meeting the Duchess in her house, Alice is horrified to see the baby she is holding crying and sneezing while the Duchess calls it ‘pig’ and beats it. Then Alice takes the baby and flees with it outside, where it transforms into a pig and Alice says ‘if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with you’, sets it down and it runs off into the woods.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alice at the Mad Tea Party and Wittgenstein’s Later Thought
There is an interesting bridge between Carroll and Wittgenstein in the figure of Bertrand Russell, a bridge which serves as a perfect illustration for our analysis of the Mad Tea Party. Carroll, Russell and Wittgenstein were all logicians who did their teaching and publishing in England. Russell met Wittgenstein in 1911, and for a while believed that Wittgenstein would be his successor. Wittgenstein however came to disprove of Russell’s theory of types in moving to his later views. Russell’s close circle of Trinity college at Cambridge was in fact dubbed “the Mad Tea Party of Trinity” in fun by many contemporaries. In his autobiography, Norbert Wiener wrote that it was impossible to describe Russell’s likeness except by identifying him with the classic illustration of the Mad Hatter by Tenniel. Wiener also pointed out G.E. Moore’s likeness to the March Hare and J.M.E. Taggart’s likeness to the Dormouse. Thus, many in Russell’s heyday thought his trio resembled Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in more ways than one.
Russell famously stated: “Mathematics is that science in which we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”. There is no better statement to illustrate the Hatter’s confusion of particular case with abstract form. The number three can designate three mountains, zebras, or logicians, but it does not refer in itself to any particular situation of three things. Wittgenstein, in rebelling against Russell and abstract analysis, in advocating analysis of particular use in situations, indeed came to take a position similar to that of Alice with respect to the Hatter in our dialogue. The Hatter’s argument does seem at first to make logical sense, but a close look at the uses of the character’s expressions reveals a confusion that lurks between abstraction and the events of the Mad Tea Party.
Among scholars there is consensus that Wittgenstein had a great appreciation of Carroll, but there is a debate as to how much Wittgenstein’s philosophy was indebted to Carroll’s nonsense play. Carroll’s name appears in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Discussing the difficulty of comprehending reversed writing, Wittgenstein notes: “Compare a remark of Lewis Carroll’s” (II xi). Unfortunately there is no citation to locate this remark in Carroll’s work, but it seems clearly related to the reverse writing of Jabberwocky. Leila S. May states “we know Alice in Wonderland was one of (Wittgenstein’s) favorite books in English”. Warren Shibles includes a philosophical analysis of Alice in Wonderland in his collection of essays, Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy (1969). In Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, George Pitcher argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll investigate nonsensical situations to use nonsense as a vaccine against itself, as an exercise for the strengthening of reason and the development of insight. In his essay Pitcher sets out to show the “remarkable extent and depth of the affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense”, adding:
I shall try to show that the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charges philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect. Second, I want to show that some quite specific philosophical doctrines that the later Wittgenstein attacks are ridiculed also by Carroll.
Pitcher presents several points of contact between Carroll and Wittgenstein: Both authors are preoccupied with the phenomena of games and rules (for example, both make use of chess and chess pieces). Both make use of utterances that “sound like English” but do not have a use and thus do not make sense. Both discuss giving gifts to one’s own limbs as a type of absurdity. Both repeatedly demonstrate that definitions and rules can be variously interpreted. Both play with the boundary between quality and identity. Both show the incomprehensibility of private language and definitions. Both pose alternate situations, imaginary worlds, that are bound by different rules than our own to show the particular difficulties we have in using language.
Now a forgotten psychiatric practice, mock tea parties were used to teach rules and manners to inmates of insane asylums in Victorian England. In Alice and Wonderland, Carroll uses a ‘mad tea party’ to make fun of the way we learn and follow rules of behavior and language. When Alice arrives at the Mad Tea Party of Wonderland, she decides to join the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse even though she is explicitly not invited. In response to Alice’s intrusion, the Hatter and Hare become combative. When Alice responds in turn by calling the Hatter rude, he presents Alice with a riddle, a riddle which we later learn has no answer: Why is a raven like a writing desk? The passage we analyze begins here, with Alice considering the Hatter’s riddle.
“…I believe I can guess that,” (Alice) added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing to you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.
This dialogue is short, but it is quite complex. Let us divide it into its seven stages, and then show how one stage leads to another. Each stage signifies a character’s turn in the dialogue, a move they make in the game of the Tea Party. The dialogue consists of an initial assertion, followed by several plays of substitution.
Alice guesses that she can guess “that”. Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to the riddle itself but to the answer to the riddle. We learn later that this answer does not exist, so Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to any actual thing. Wittgenstein notes that we can look for someone who is not there but we cannot hang him when he is not there (§462). Alice’s ‘that’ is used correctly, even if it is a signifier that does not specify an existent object.
Substituting his own expression for Alice’s, The March Hare makes three verbal substitutions. He substitutes ‘think’ for ‘believe’, ‘find out’ for ‘guess’, and ‘the answer to the riddle’ for ‘that’. The March Hare does not say exactly what Alice said, but the only significant difference is exchanging Alice’s ‘that’ for the object it designates. Based on this change, the March Hare acts as if Alice has misspoken and he is offering a correction, a more detailed expression. Alice takes the March Hare’s substitution as an equivalence, such that Alice meant something by her expression and the March Hare meant the same thing, grasping her meaning and also expressing it, thus putting two expressions to work for the same meaning. Violating Alice’s perception, the March Hare replies to Alice as if she has accepted a correction to her expression, not an equivalent substitution.
This reveals something interesting about a bifurcation in our use of ‘you mean’ in conversation with others. We use the expression ‘you mean’ together with a substitution in both a positive and negative way: positively as equivalences, negatively as corrections. We say ‘you mean x’ to translate other’s thoughts into our own words, seeking their approval in doing so (as Alice takes the March Hare to be doing by substituting his own expression for hers), but we also say ‘you mean x’ to correct the expressions of others, attempting to express what we believe they mean but they have failed to express (as the March Hare takes his substitution for Alice’s expression). Wittgenstein speaks of a fuzzy picture, and how often a fuzzy picture is just what we mean by our expression. Alice’s ‘that’ was correct even if it was fuzzy. This view supports Alice’s side, that Alice did not misspeak and the March Hare did not correct Alice’s ‘that’.
It is important to note for what follows that the March Hare has brought the word ‘should’ into the conversation. In replacing Alice’s ‘that’ with ‘the answer’ he is still discussing the particular expression of Alice, but in moralizing he is abstracting meaning from the situation and presenting Alice with a normative substitute for what he perceives as her behavior in this particular instance. The March Hare is subtly leading away from the situation towards generalization.
Now Alice becomes the one making a substitution for the March Hare’s speech. Alice insists that, ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know’. What does Alice mean by ‘same’ here? How does Alice use the word ‘same’ in this instance? When Alice agrees that she ‘means what she says’ and also asserts that she ‘says what she means’, she is not moralizing or providing us with a general rule that applies to all of her expressions. She is not indicating that she always means what she says or says what she means, but rather that she meant what she said and said what she meant in the particular instance when she said “I believe that I can guess that”. Because Alice is only discussing one instance, and because in this instance Alice meant and expressed one thing, the two propositions ‘I meant the thing I said’ and ‘I said the thing I meant’ can have the same use in this case. Thus Alice substitutes one for the other, and pronounces the two to be ‘the same’. Wittgenstein writes:
The use of the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of “proposition” and the use of “true”. (§225)
If we agree with Wittgenstein that the March Hare did not significantly correct Alice, we can agree with Alice that the coincidence of meaning and saying are mutually supportive when she equates the two expressions.
These two expressions do not always coincide. There are cases which we call misspeaking, when one fails to say what one means. There are also cases which we call lying, when one fails to mean what one says. Typically, but not always, it is up to others to tell when we misspeak, and up to us to tell when we are lying. Alice’s substitution is aimed at deferring to the March Hare his typically right as a listener to correct Alice when she does not say what she means, but she insists that “at least, I mean what I say”, which is her typical right as a speaker to confirm.
The Mad Hatter disagrees with Alice, but he does not do several things. He does not argue against Alice having meant what she said, does not argue against Alice having said what she meant like the Hare, nor does the Hatter argue against the idea that ‘meaning what one says’ and ‘saying what one means’ can be ‘the same thing’ in Alice’s case or in any case. What does the Hatter attack? The Mad Hatter attacks the general form of Alice’s expression. He is arguing that ‘If x then y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘If y then x’. He does this by offering a counter example to this general form: ‘I see what I eat’ is not the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’. This is generally true, but we can construct cases in which the set of things one eats is exactly the set of things one sees and vice versa.
Alice started towards generality and abstraction with her guess that she could guess, and the Hare lead the dialogue in this direction with his moralizing about what Alice should do based on her particular case. Thus when Alice defends herself in her particular case she is already speaking in terms that have been generalized by the Hare. The Hatter slips in at this point with a valid formal argument that is not in fact talking about Alice’s particular case. Because our expressions refer to both generalities and particularities with the same terms, it is easy to miss the Hatter’s confusion of the subject.
The Hatter gives us an excellent and subtle example of confusing the subject of conversation by generalizing with abstractions. He does not realize that he has failed to argue against the possibility of Alice’s case, but is rather arguing that many things do not share the relationship that meaning and saying do when we express ourselves adequately.
Regardless of this confusion, The March Hare backs the Hatter’s attack and produces another counter example: ‘I like what I get’ is not (in most cases) the same as ‘I get what I like’. The Hare does for the Hatter what he refused to do for Alice: he substitutes his expression as an equivalent expression. The Dormouse, following the Hatter and Hare adds a further counter example of the same general form: ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is not the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’. The three of them are in agreement against the universal validity of the general form of Alice’s substitution. The three argue by presenting cases where ‘I x what I y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘I y what I x’.
If we wanted to attack Alice’s substitution, we would have to show that ‘I mean what I say’ and ‘I say what I mean’ have different uses and are thus not the same. The Hatter does not attempt to do this, and neither he nor his two cohorts use examples that include either meaning or saying. Instead, they provide disparate examples that show there are many cases when ‘I x what I y’ is not the same as ‘I y what I x’. The Mad Tea Party trio seems to be performing a formal analysis of Alice’s expression, but they are in fact confusing an abstracted form for the situation of the case present at hand. We can ourselves witness this sort of confusion in everyday arguments.
The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse all form a chord of replies (a very small school of thought) that is in agreement amongst its members in disagreement with Alice, but the Hatter violates this accord. He disrupts the agreement of the series by turning on the Dormouse. The Hatter here reverses his position against Alice, arguing that since the Dormouse sleeps all the time, ‘sleeping when breathing’ and ‘breathing when sleeping’ are ‘the same thing’ in its case. Thus the Hatter has provided a particular case where ‘I x what I y’ and ‘I y what I x’ have the same use and he uses the word ‘same’ the way that Alice does. The Hatter not only has failed to lock Alice in the room, but he himself walks right out the door he unknowingly left open as if he knew it was open all the while.
The dialogue presents us with both a convergence of meaning and saying (Alice’s defense) and a contradiction of meaning and saying (the Hatter’s attack of Alice and then the Dormouse). This mirrors the divergence of supplementation and correction found earlier. In argument, one says things that both agree and disagree with one’s opponent. In the course of an argument, one can find oneself getting into contradictions the farther one gets from particular cases, but one can only examine particular cases by drawing similarities across groups of cases by generalizing. The Hatter is unknowingly demonstrating to Alice that while she may be correct that meaning and saying converge in her expression, meaning and saying can also diverge to the point of contradiction through the course of an argument.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alice leaves the Tea Party and finds a door in a tree that leads to the garden she wanted to get to from the banquet hall she fell into through the rabbit hole, but now she finds that the garden is inhabited by the angry and vengeful Queen of Hearts playing a game of croquet with animals (flamingos and groundhogs) as the game pieces (like Looking Glass game of chess involving characters, Witt and life as games).
Cheshire cat shows up, causes a commotion. King and executioner get into an argument about whether the head of the Cheshire cat can be beheaded. This parallels the ‘grin without the cat’ earlier (Math and Logic as head/mind without body, effect without substance). The executioner argues that the cat can’t be beheaded without a body to separate from the head, and the king argues that anything with a head can be beheaded.
The Duchess is now nice to Alice, angry in her own house the way Queen is angry in her garden. This is like the pig switch earlier. Alice is delighted, and decides that pepper made the Duchess angry. She begins to devise (too) simple rules for causes of emotions (Witt and oven vs. simple essences and causes), ex: sugar makes people sweet. The Duchess now approaches Alice and begins coming up with an absurd moral for everything Alice says, which annoys Alice (notice that the Duchess is showing Alice her own absurdity).
Now, Alice attends the trial where the King is prosecuting the Jack for eating tarts (notice rhyme setting up the scene). Alice begins to grow into a giant at the trial, which no one notices until she is called as a witness which is her final act in the dream of Wonderland. Alice accidentally knocks over the jury box, and puts a lizard back upside down, reasoning that a lizard is just as good a juror either way up (this is similar to some/some not vs. All or None). Alice tells the king she knows nothing about the case, and the king says this is very important to the jury. Alice says it is not important at all, and the king goes ‘important, unimportant’, like he is trying to decide which sounds best. Some of the jury write down important, some unimportant. Giant Alice finds all of this absurd. She declares that the evidence is meaningless, the jurors write down that she thinks this as if it is thus true, and she ‘pack of cards’ destroys trial and dream.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Through the Looking Glass
In the beginning, Alice is playing with her cat and cat’s kittens, blaming the black kitten for trying to take milk from the white kitten. Alice says she should put the kitten out in the snow as a punishment for its mischief, then forgets this as she thinks of how horrible her punishment for all of her mischief would be. Later, we find the black kitten is the Red Queen, who takes on Alice’s vindictive and judgmental side while the White Queen takes on her forgetful and forgiving side. Alice is a pawn, making her way across the chessboard to be queen, and at the ending banquet the two queens still are confusing her but they are sitting at her sides.
Alice passes through the mirror and into the Looking Glass world (again, like rabbit hole, falling into a dream). She finds herself in a garden with flowers that interpret her to be a flower (like pigeon thinking she must be a serpent or duck saying ‘it’ is most often a rock or a worm). They tell her about the Red Queen, who they also assume to be a flower, one very much like Alice. The Red Queen now meets Alice, who says she has lost her way, to which the Red Queen replies ‘all these ways are mine’ (like Humpty Dumpty thinking he can mean what he wants regardless of what others think AND tell Alice what she should mean).
Alice points to a hill, and the Red Queen says, ‘I could show you hills compared to which that is a valley’. Alice replies that a hill can’t be a valley, no matter how small, for this is nonsense. The queen replies, ‘I have heard nonsense compared to which that is as sensible as a dictionary’.
The Red Queen tells Alice she is a pawn in a chess game being played all over the world. To get going, they both run, but end up not moving. The queen remarks, “Here, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in place”.
Much later, Alice meets the White Queen, who lives and remembers backwards and finds this best (mind vs. world). She tells Alice she is 101, and Alice replies that she can’t believe that. The White Queen says close your eyes and try very hard. Alice says this won’t work, as one can’t believe impossible things. The queen replies, ‘You need practice…when I was your age, I sometimes believed 6 impossible things before breakfast’ (Logic as imaginary abstraction, thus impossible ideals). The White Queen turns into a sheep knitting with seven pairs of needles (sheep is woolly, knitting wool). They are now in a shop, and Alice is told to take something. She tries, but reaching for things they seem to slide out of reach and up into the ceiling (abstractions again). Then they are suddenly in a boat, and Alice is reaching for the prettiest rushes but they are always out of reach, the one’s she can get wilting in her hands.
Humpty Dumpty – Read pg 168-169, ‘knockdown’ (straw man), who is master of meaning? Many have noted that Humpty Dumpty is the perfect illustration of Wittgenstein’s argument for the impossibility of a private language. Meaning is not simply what the individual wants it to be. Humpty Dumpty gives himself the right to mean whatever he wants, but he is critical of Alice and gives himself the right to tell her what she should have meant. There are two privileged positions in communication: sender and receiver. Which one has the true right to say what something meant? The answer seems to be that both have overlapping rights that can eclipse each other.
Alice meets the White Knight, who has stuff from the whole book on his horse. He falls off on either side of his horse like human judgement falling to one side or the other on an issue. He invents things when he is upside down, saying the blood rushes to his head and helps him to think. His song, “A Sittin’ on a Gate”, refers to a suspension of judgement and logic, being undecided with one’s feet in both worlds.
HUMOR AND MODERN ART
Philosophy can and is used for creativity, using the doubts and insights to create, playing with the boundaries and tensions of the most important things. Humor and Art are two ways of using one’s insights from Philosophy to do this. Humor and art are of course ancient, but modern art and humor are very advanced. Last time, we saw Lewis Carroll was reacting against society and Victorian strict discipline of children, showing the contradictions of authority and the assumptions we make in reasoning that are dependent upon our position in the situation.
HUMOR AS SKEPTICISM
Two early American masters of humor are Ambrose Bierce and Groucho Marx, both of whom were reacting to the horror and absurdity of the times (Bierce to the Civil War, and the Marx Brothers to WWI).
Ambrose Bierce: (1842-1914?) His Devil’s Dictionary was an early rebellious attack on society.
A San Franciscan (since 1866), he wrote bitterly about the Civil War and the corruption on both sides (Union and Confederacy) then disappeared in Mexico seeking the revolution. He had a brilliant gift with pointing out how we are all selfish and ignorant (one-sided judgments) with humor, attacking the politicians, the military, the rich, slavery, and American society.
Some Entries from his Devil’s Dictionary (1906 ‘Cynic’s Word Book’):
Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Conservative - a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Egotist: a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hashish: there is no definition of this word. No one knows what this word means.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
The Marx Brothers (comedians of the 20s and 30s) were early absurdists, formative for US comedy. Groucho Marx was amazing with one liners that show a beautifully complex understanding of contradictions involving human pride and judgment, very much like Bierce:
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.
Why a four-year old child could understand this. Somebody find a four-year old child.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? …And east is east and west is west… and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
MODERN ART AS SKEPTICISM
With WWI and modern warfare, there were new human horrors on previously unseen levels. Similar to the German Pessimism that influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the horrors of WWI brought great disillusionment with reason, science and society to European intellectuals, particularly for German and French youth who would have a huge impact on modern culture. Here in the Bay Area, a very similar movement happened in reaction to the Vietnam War. WWI used more machines and propaganda than ever before, and for this is often called the first modern war. Oil became the fuel of war and vehicles, planes, jeeps (and after WWI, the Middle East was carved up by European powers as the source of oil). This was the beginning of machine guns and air warfare, bombing runs, tanks.
Newspapers all became mouthpieces of the government in times of war. To European intellectuals who conversed across national lines, this showed logic and language being used for authority and empire in the name of reason. The dominant scholars often sang nationalistic praise, particularly in Philosophy departments. The students and others came together to doubt and be skeptical of the powers that be on a level that had a new intensity (fueled on Nietzsche, Marx and others).
Modern art and humor start from this point. They shatter and destroy, ‘ripping’ on the powers that be and the truths we are told by authorities. Modern art and humor put things out of joint, not resolving contradictions but bringing them explicitly out, possibly more than any culture yet. They help to simplify and focus work which is abstract and disconnected on purpose as a revolt against the positive collective power of the traditional.
DADA: “guerilla warfare against the Establishment”
During WWI (1915-1917) young intellectuals from all over Europe converged in Zurich, Switzerland. They shared an opposition to the war and traditional values. To these thinkers, the stupidity and brutality of the modern age was clearly being sold to the masses through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘order’, ‘logic’, and ‘spirit’. They found these terms to be hypocritical on a societal level, and declared a crisis of meaning: European civilization, and human reason, the new modern values, are a farce. Thus, use absurdity to bring out the contradictions in the ‘reason’ and the ‘reasonable’.
Some of these similarly minded youth converged on the Cabaret Voltaire, a beer parlor run by Hugo Ball. Jazz music was the new rage, violating old traditional standards. Ball and his friend Huelsenbeck were looking for a fake French name for a dancer in a French dictionary when they found the word dada: ‘baby talk for horse, a child’s rocking horse’. They decided that this word fit the movement that they felt was going on in Zurich. The parlor became the first home and center. Much art that was brutal and bizarre appeared here, a new turn that is critical for modern art and humor.
Dada’s two celebrated themes are brutalism and simultaneity. Their brutalism, being obscene (sex, swearing, being intoxicated, making no sense on purpose) spoke against society, violating cultural norms using absurdity and obscenity (much like later Hunter S. Thompson, South Park).
Simultaneity is the occurrence of many disconnected elements within a work, a resistance polarized against making the whole coherent. Collage involves using many different types of media blended together to create (the Dadaists were famous for using newspaper type and pictures in collage, unseen before their time). Simultaneity and collage in the hands of the Dadaists were used to portray disconnected life, impossible to know as a complete and finished system. This is both a celebration and a protest, loving yet fearing the contradictions of the world. The Dadaists invented an impressive set of ‘new’ art forms, including abstract sound poems, abstract (mechanical) music, found art (garbage collage), simultaneous poetry (the reading of many poems at once), and abstract painting.
Out of Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, the Dada movement began and quickly spread to Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and across the whole world. Our modern culture, which is not simply Western but global, includes the deep and playful skepticism of DADA. The Beatniks and Hippies of the Bay picked up the Motherwell anthology as a major source.
Great DADA Moments & Quotes:
In one of the first shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, Schwitters showed the audience a one letter poem, a card with a large ‘W’. He then started to recite the poem, starting with a whisper and ending in a loud wailing siren.
In April of 1920, Orp, Baargeld and Ernst put on an infamous Dada show in Cologne, France. Sitting next to a tank of red tinted water with an alarm clock submerged at the bottom, Ernst had created a wooden sculpture with an axe chained to it. A sign invited anyone who wished to use the axe to help destroy the sculpture. In a Paris exhibit of Ernst’s work, invitations read: “at 22 o’clock the kangaroo, at 22:30 high frequency, at 23 o’clock distribution of surprises, after 23:30 intimacies.” The exhibit itself was a Dada performance. Breton munched matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes kept shouting, ‘It is raining on a skull’, Soupault and Tzara played a game of hide and seek, while Peret and Charchoune continuously shook hands. These performances are early precursors to performance art (which culminated in Situationalism and Fluxus, of which Yoko Ono was a prominent figure).
Huelsenbeck
“It’s a fucked-up foolish world. You walk aimlessly along, fixing up a philosophy for supper. But before you have it ready, the mailman brings you the first telegram, announcing that all your pigs have died of rabies, your dinner jacket has been thrown off the Eiffel Tower, your housekeeper has come down with the epizootic. You give a startled look at the moon, which seems to you like a good investment, and the same postman brings you a telegram announcing that all your chickens have died of hoof and mouth disease, your father has fallen on a pitchfork and frozen to death, your mother has burst with sorrow on the occasion of her silver wedding (maybe the frying pan stuck to her ears, how do I know?). That’s life, dear fellow.”
“The Germans are the masters of dissembling, they are unquestionably the magicians (in the vaudeville sense) among nations, in every moment of their life they conjure up a culture, a spirit, a superiority which they can hold as a shield in front of their endangered bellies.”
“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand-fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”
Tristan Tzara
The foremost Dada manifesto writer, Tzara was famous for reading his manifestoes interspersed in Dada performances. He was a leader of the movement in Zurich, and then later in Paris, where the European scene is considered to have migrated with him.
From Tzara’s Dada Manifestos:
“Dada remains within the European frame of weakness it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate.”
“Dada exists for no one and we want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.”
“I love you so I swear I do adore you.”
“If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,” I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs…”
“I am against all systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own littleness, to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies…”
“Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth.
I still consider myself very charming.”
“A great Canadian philosopher has said: thought and the past are also very charming.”
(Here, the genders on ‘thought’ and ‘past’ are reversed, a common way of mocking Americans speaking French.)
From Tzara’s Lecture on Dada (1922)
“I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven’t the faintest idea…You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life.”
“Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference….Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions…But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.”
“Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people…The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog…If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be shaken… Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.”
We are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi (Zhuang Zi, Second Patriarch of Daoism) was just as Dada as we are.”
Tzara’s invention of the Automism method of Surrealism painters and art long after.
To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”
Surrealism:
Gets its heritage from DADA, but had to develop beyond Nonsense as target. Still hazy in complexity, many things coming together strangely, but now with subtle underlying tensions, often of sex, danger, power, and death underlie the work. Today pop-surrealism is thriving in the Bay, LA & NY.
The surrealist poem Fable of Jarry:
A can of corned beef, on a chain like opera glasses,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside,
like the can of corned beef,
it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.
Conceptual Art is a development from Duchamp and other Dada & Surreal artists. It hit its heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. Now, one cannot go through a museum without seeing much of its influence. Following pieces are from Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art.
Dada Duchamp’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity:
A sparkplug that reads ‘for-ever’
Later, after joining the Surrealists, Duchamp wound string through the gallery of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit, connecting everything such that no one could get through the gallery.
Rauschenberg’s contribution to Iris Clert Gallery’s exhibit of Readymades: postcard that says, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.
Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning Drawing, framed and exhibited as a new work.
Manzoni drew lines of certain lengths, rolled up the paper strips, put them in boxes labeled with date and line length, sold as artwork. Also sold balloons of ‘artist’s breath’, and his own shit in cans for their weight in gold. He signed people as if they were his art.
Warhol Soup Cans & Marilyn silk screen prints: “a hundred Marilyns are better than one”, soup cans put on shelves like canned goods. Movies ‘Empire’ and ‘Sleep’, as critic Koch said, better to hear about than see.
La Monte Young composed a poem for tables, a performance piece of dragging furniture around on stage to make noises. He was one of the early performance artists who created ‘happenings’, often including audience members to take down the “fourth wall”.
Simone Forti Fluxus performance: one man try to lie down, the other try to tie first to the wall.
Morris’ Box with sound of own making: wooden box containing a tape recorder w/ loop.
Nauman read Wittgenstein passage from PI reasoning that ‘A Rose Has no Teeth” can make sense if you include the thorns or a cow in the process of rose regeneration or something else, and so he made a plaque for a tree knowing that the tree slowly grows over the plaque.
Baldessari (1971) has students cover an exhibit room with “I will not make any boring art” like students writing as punishment over and over (is this boring?).
Arnatt’s mirror boxes: positive mirror out box next to box-like hole lined with inward mirrors.
Ruppersberg’s Homage to Houdini: set of photographs documenting sinking brick chained in a suitcase of a NY pier (as Godfrey says, ‘Surprisingly, the brick did not escape’).
Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water on a glass shelf installed. In a dialogue posted next to the work, the artist claims that the glass of water is, in fact, now an oak tree.
The Nest Group (1978) had a piece called Let’s Come One Meter Closer, where several of the group’s artists in various places around world each dug a meter deep hole and stood in it.
Mendieta’s Rape performance: after a woman was raped and killed on campus, she recreated the scene in her apartment with herself as victim and invited friends and associates over (hopefully giving them some kind of warning, though this is not said).
Wilke’s What does this represent? What do YOU represent? A photo of a naked woman surrounded by toy guns, with two phrases above and below.
Almeida’s Inhabited painting: several photos of artist obscuring self with blue paint, then final shot takes glass she has painted and shifts it to peek out from behind it at the viewer.
For great short surreal films, watch Svankmajer
