the decline of the laugh

 

Jean Fourastié was one of the architects, in France, of the thirty glorious years of the postwar economy. He had reformed, or advised on the reformation of the French social insurance system in the thirties, and after the war he wrote optimistic books about the new world opened up by the consumer phase of capitalism. His predictions about the rising level of lifestyle seemed to be on target in the fifties and sixties, but somehow, Fourastié fell off the optimist wagon as he observed what consumerism had wrought – not a leisured and cultured working class in tandem with a leisured and cultured administrative class, but a mad rush towards disposable products and lifestyles that, in his view, had lost sight of, or even jettisoned, the volupté of satisfaction for the addictions to second degree wants that were manufactured by a new class of capitalist. The large mark of that turn was everywhere – in the environment, in the cultural impoverishment of non-urban areas, in the way in which busyness had infected all lives with addictions to perpetual scratching, as it were. The society of consumption turned out to be a society addicted to the itch.  As Regis Bolat puts it in his essay on Fourastié ‘s pre-1968 turn (one similar to Galbraith’s in the late fifties):

Fourastié thus painted a portrait of a “new homo economicus” of whom the essential trait is avidity. He saw in the indefinite growth of human needs what gave French society its preponderant characteristics and strongly conditioned the society of tomorrow. All research on consumption that took place in progressive countries seems to confirm this indefinite growth. Needs grow once the level of life is elevated: “no limit, no lassitude of the appetite of consumption, is what is always revealed by the statistics, whatever the amount of revenue expended.” In other words, Fourastié discovered that there was no internal limit within consumption, no horizon of satisfaction that allows the consumer, in a society in which consumables are subject to radical and rapid change and extension, to stop.

This is the background to Fourastié’s essay on the decline of laughter – or the laugh, le rire – in 20^th century ordinary life, Reflection sur le rire. Or, to put this in today’s terms, the decline of laughing out loud to LOL – an acronym that usually signals not laughing out loud, but pretend laughing out loud. Fourastié refers to Bergson’s treatise on the laugh as the classic work on the subject, but one that curiously neglects the psychological need to laugh. Being an economist, Fourastié is interested less in the individual’s psychology that the psychology of the collective. Whether or not the decline of the laugh really tracks the decline of “gaiety” in the street or the decline of laughing in the life of a man, Fourastié, who was approaching old age, his larger point about the utility, so to speak, of the laugh is worthy of his title.

Fourastié frames the laugh as a form of thought – or a form of thinking. “In fact, because laughter is a pheminon of joy and pleasure, the mechanism of the laugh engenders participaton in conceptual thought of instinctive forces.” This function is related to a more general notion of what is funny: “Every funny object presunts a “rupture of determinism”, a failure, a mini-conflect of sense and non-sense that the laugher must resolve by himself if he wants to laugh.” Laughter, in this view, or the object of the laugh, is a koan.

Fourastié was not the man to look at the intersectional victimage of the collective laugh – its policing of hierarchies.  But he is, I think, on target that laughter also addresses failure – a break in the logic of hierarchy.

I myself think that the gaiety of the Paris street has not really dimmed, although every account of the countryside and the far suburbs shows that this gaiety has turned sour.

Once, when I was a newfledged graduate student in the philosophy department at U.T., I had an experience of the laugh as omen. I was attending a class on Kant’s ethics. And the professor, a sweet man and one immersed in the atmosphere of anglo American philosophy at that time – analytic – mused one day that surveys didn’t seem to bear Kant out: people seemed less inclined to do things out of duty than to seek being happy. This way of putting things, which made it seem, suddenly, that normal people were outside of our circle, made me laugh. Except I couldn’t, since I was in the class and nobody else was laughing. This built my laugh up. The more I thought about it, the more absurd seemed the whole thing, and the class, and perhaps my being in philosophy itself. Whether I asked to excuse myself or we had a break, I don’t know. I simply remember walking up and down the hall in the building doubled over with laughter. Laughter is a power – it can seize a person. And especially a character such as myself, who have long been undermined in my efforts to be a serious person by a strong sense of absurdity.

I guess that laughter told me all I really needed to know about the unlikelihood, in my case, of an academic life.