The Work of Art that Observes Itself: The Aesthetics of Interpassivity

Abstract

This chapter starts with the example that triggered the discovery of interpassivity: TV-SitComs with ‘canned laughter’ - such as Two and a Half Men, The Munsters, Golden Girls and so on. Is it possible that some observers prefer not laughing themselves and seeing their pleasure vicariously fulfilled by the TV program? What can this tell us about pleasure? Why do some people not want to have their pleasure themselves? And if so, why are they still so interested in seeing it experienced by some vicarious agent (a TV program, a friend, an animal, a machine and so on)? The chapter investigates the ethic and aesthetic questions that follow from this, with some guidance from psychoanalysis and philosophy - for example, the necessity of the other in Kant's aesthetics of the sublime, or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous investigation whether one can feel pain in someone else’s leg.