Morin’s Paradox 86

This discussion of understanding and the mutual interaction of discourse lead me to a paradox that Morin identifies. Morin’s approach to mutual understanding necessitates an awareness of human complexity. In his work for UNESCO, Morin develops his idea that literature, theatre and cinema can foster this awareness. For Morin, literature, poetry and cinema are like “schools” of human understanding because they show us the complexity of human relationships

82 _{Speech-acts in J.L. Austin’s “acts of speech” are the situation in which the} utterance is uttered (Austin 1975:20;52).

83 _{Kinesics, according to Fernando Poyatos, refers to gestures, manners and} postures. This includes gaze movements, hand movements, breathing, stride, gait styles, and even more subtle movements known as microkinesics (Poyatos 2002:185-186;225).

(1998:4-5). In the cinema, spectators are “rarely alienated by what they see on the screen. In fact they become much more understanding than in real life” (Morin 2006:30). People who are ordinarily looked down on are understood. “The paradox is that we are often more understanding when we read a novel or see a film than we are in real life” (Morin 2006:30-31). Films, in particular, “draw on the fullness of our subjectivity, bringing us to understand and sympathize with people who in ordinary circumstances would be foreign or revolting” (Morin 1999:53).

In order to investigate this presupposition, I will now turn to Morin’s brief, yet relevant remarks on Chaplin. Morin supports his thesis with an example from cinema – that of seeing a tramp in the street versus seeing Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp on the cinema screen. “Celui qui a repugnance pour le vagabond

rencontré dans la rue sympathise de tout son Coeur, au cinema, avec le vagabond Charlot” (Morin 1999b:56).84 In this statement, Morin draws on themes of sympathy, ethics, cinema versus reality, and the Tramp’s role in society. Morin presents a type of understanding that involves intersubjectivity and openness to others as other subjects (Morin 1999:50;53). The Tramp explains what it feels like to be a tramp and why he does what he does. In invoking this screen character, Morin contends that human understanding requires empathy, identification and projection, and through this type of

84 _{Morin, in the original French, uses Charlot. Charlot is the French term for} Charlie Chaplin. Le Petit Robert defines Charlot as, diminutif de Charles, nom

du personage comique créé par Charlie Chaplin. The common noun, charlot,

understanding, “someone who is disgusted by a tramp he sees in the street will open his heart to the movie tramp, Charlie Chaplin.”

Morin implies that all film characters have the potential to exchange everyday indifference toward the suffering of others for sympathy and compassion in the cinema. Is Chaplin merely one of many actors who hew to Morin’s observations? How does Chaplin draw out sympathy, demanding that his audience not deride, or deplore, or detest, but listen to the Tramp?85

Chaplin exploits an awareness of human complexity that Morin speaks about. Pathos, with its affective influence on an audience can undermine the audience’s ability to reason or reflect critically.Bakhtin points out that empathy in drama threatens alterity in that empathy destroys the self/other distinction (Cunliffe 1993:59;62). Chaplin’s films, however, are no illusionist drama.86 By blending pathos and comedy, he prolongs the gap between himself and the audience, and inspires reflection on the part of the audience. Lawrence Mintz writes, “Chaplin’s comedy exposes us as it makes it easier for us to accept our reality; his pathos demands that we respond sympathetically” (Mintz 1991:100). It is by

85 _{Recalling Spinoza: “…I have taken great care to understand human actions,} and not to deride, deplore, or denounce them. I have therefore regarded human passions like love, hate, anger, envy, pride, pity, and the other feelings that agitate the mind, not as vices of human nature, but as properties which belong to it in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder and the like belong to the nature of the atmosphere” (Spinoza/Wernham 1958:263). in: de Spinoza, B., 1958. The

political works the Theologico-Politicus, Tractatus Politicus in full, edited and

translated by A.G. Wernham. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

86 _{As opposed to Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre that uses alienation techniques.} Brecht saw the theatre of the 1920s and 30s as illusionist because a ‘suspension of disbelief’ made the audience prone to ‘escapism’. In his ‘epic theatre’, he challenges the audience by creating distance between audience and characters.

no accident that Morin cites the Tramp as an example of how an awareness of human complexity fosters mutual understanding. The Tramp is a paragon of listening. By imbuing the screen with dialogue and through listening to himself- as-other, Chaplin makes his listening listened to.

Morin’s discussion of Chaplin regarding his theory of human complexity and understanding illustrates openness in Chaplin’s work. This openness makes possible his attending to and answering the other by way of extending temporally and stretching out spatially. Openness to the other will be important when I explain how a relation to self that is not a self-presence is integral to Nancean listening. This relation is a referral to a space of a self that is itself as other, and not presence to self.