Is Nonsense Possible? An Answer Through Film, with Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze

With regard to film, and especially to the film genre, which is one of the most powerful systems of sensemaking in popular culture ever, the relation of sense and nonsense has to be rethought. The article examines the possibility of nonsense in its own right as the core of the film genre instead of nonsense just as (impossible) negation of sensemaking. To this end, it takes up Stanley Cavell’s concept of the film genre as a tool of philosophical discourse and his distinction between “genre-as-cycle” and “genre-as-medium”. It takes the 1937 Laurel and Hardy film “Way Out West” as an example of a film that comprehends both structures at one time, dissolving the underlying assumptions about the philosophy of the genre (part 1). Since this film is a genre parody, the argument then goes back to Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of parody and of humor (part 2). It can show that in the groundings of parody and of humor, in sharp contrast to mere irony, which revolves the hierarchical order of discourse but leaves it intact, ground- and rootless operations of singularization, of displacement, of ambiguization, of unhinging meaning, and of gliding surfaces are to be found. Read with Deleuze’s “Logic of sense”, the example shows that and how film genre itself is rooted in genre parody; that is, in nonsense.