I like your typo, Liz, "nonesense" and I wondered too in typing out this particular
quote if it seemed too tilted by itself and to do a disservice to the book, which
looks at a variety of things, nonsense games and rhymes, etc, that children
learn, the works of Borges, Nabokov, Beckett, Rabelais, Swift, the surrealists
Breton and Tzara, the poems of Edward Field, Alice in Wonderland, etc, and
Stewart does make the point about the relationship between common sense and
nonsense. Maybe this quote will do better by it:

Simply put, the essay looks at common sense as an organization of the world,
as a model of order, integrity and coherence accomplished in social life. And
nonsense is considered as an activity by which the world is disorganized and
reorganized. The essay sees common sense not as a stable ground for social
process, but as an ongoing accomplishment of that process--acts of common
sense will shape acts of nonsense and acts of nonsense will shape acts of
common sense. Thus I have assumed that organization is always a
reorganization brought about by disorganization, that change and learning are
continual and continuous

Well, and, no, Stewart doesn't think that nonsense is 'safe, comic and reassuring'
for she ends the book by saying "(Nonsense" refuses the uplifting note by which
the world assumes a happy ending) but then as a folklorist and cultural
anthropologist, she may include more within the realm of nonsense, carnival for
instance, and any number of texts.  Or as she writes at the end:

The contrasts between common sense and nonsense are not so much contrasts
of content as of procedure. Common sense proceeds by maximizing pattern. All
social meaning is created by means of redundancy, and the verification of
patterns of meaning is also the verification of social relationships. To borrow an
example from Bateson, when someone says "it's raining," one expects the
audience to look out the window and confirm that the statement is correct for
'few people in this situation restrain themselves from seemingly duplicating this
information by looking out the window. ...The utterance of "A stitch in time
saves nine" or "You know what I mean" is a metonymic geture, confirming an
assumed-to-be-shared social meaning. Whether such meaning is actually
shared or not is not the point; the point is the assumption and the way the
assumption allows one to continue through the various dimensions of
experience with privileges of signification.

Nonsense both depends upon and interrupts this metonymy. In nonsense, a
statement that "it's raining" could result in the audience holding out their hands
and looking at the ceiling. The nonsense gesture interrupts not only the
metonymy of common sense but...of social relationships verified through
common sense. Thus, although nonsense may be insulated through framing,
through its status as an impossible context, its contexts are at the same time
fields for the manipulation and recreation of social relationships. We have only
to think of the anomaly of carnival or rites of inversion, or the calculated chaos
of the 'reign of terror.'.. In nonsense, hierarchies of relevance are flattened,
inverted, and manipulated in a gesture that questions the idea of hierarchy
itself. Hence the danger of nonsense not only as a valueless activity but as an
activity "without values."

And I typed in that bit for Dominic, because yes nonsense can be utter chaos in
Stewart's view, a sort of infinite disintegration 'an infinite movement of
undercutting the world all at once and over and over again' as much as infinite
play. Or as the book starts out with a quote from Valery

Two dangers threaten
the world--order and disorder.

So it's about the movement, ambiguities and various relatedness between the
two.

Best,

Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 11:17:34 +0000
>From: Liz Kirby <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Cluckability
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>> "Nonsense is a threat...to the univocality of common sense, and is thus
>> articulated as a separate, impossible, or unrealizable domain. Nonsense is
>> thereby a domain between realizable domains, a domain that does not
count,
>> and we have seen that ...its liminal status is important for members making
a
>> transistion between realizable domains. It is a place to stand in the middle
of
>> change. Here again, we can see the importance of nonsense and other
>> "impossible contents" for getting from one state of things to another, the
>> motion that is characteristic not only of change, but of learning as well."
>
>I find this rather an overblown claim for nonesense..... the word itself and all
its connotations seem to me to confirm the secure status of 'sense'. Nonesense
is safe, comic and reassuring isnt it?
>
>Liz
>
>-----------------------------------------
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