Inconspicuous Pleasure

When my son was about two, one of his favourite games was roaring. I would be the bear, or the lion, or some nameless monster, and I would roar at him, and he would shriek with delight and demand that I do it again. And again. And again. I was the performer and he was the audience, and his delight was the payment that kept the show running. Occasionally, though, I got it wrong. A roar too convincing, a lunge a little too real, and the shrieks became tears. The game collapsed, and it took a loving cuddle to mend.

What interests me is not that he was frightened, which is easy enough to understand, but that most of the time he wasn't, or not more than he could handle. He knew perfectly well what was going on, and he wanted the roar to be frightening, but not too frightening. He wanted, in other words, to enjoy a pretence without being overwhelmed by the feelings it elicited. That is a remarkable thing to want, and I think it may be closer to the heart of what makes us human than we might suppose.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson noticed something similar in a zoo in 1952. "I saw two young monkeys playing," he wrote, "i.e. engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to, but not the same as those of combat." The playful nip, as he famously put it, denotes the bite. Both monkeys have to be in on it, or the play fight becomes a real one. Bateson called these "metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules", which is an odd way to gesture towards the pre-linguistic. The gesture is important, but the terminology works against it.

Still, the observation itself is sound, and it is not confined to monkeys. Many dogs "bow" before play: the front end drops as if to spring, and then waits. Marc Bekoff found that they often bow again straight after a bite or a tumble that might have gone too far. It is tempting to say the bow means "still playing", but we needn't suppose anything so grand. A behaviour reliably followed by play comes to be expected to bring play, and that is all that's required. Many primates have a play face that works the same way as a contextual cue. Animals' play has its own reliable preludes and repairs, without anyone needing to treat them as signals, and good science avoids reading in more than the behaviour requires, whether linguistic rules, metalinguistic ones, or indeed any rules at all.

So play, with its preludes and repairs, is not what makes us unusual. Something else is.

Here's a wee clue. In a 2018 study of preschool children watching cartoons, Caspar Addyman and his colleagues found that children laughed eight times as much when watching with others as when watching alone, and smiled nearly three times as much. But they rated the cartoons as no funnier. The extra laughter wasn't a report of added amusement. It was for each other. Why else would anyone go to the pub to watch a match they could just as easily watch at home? Delight, it turns out, is something we give, and something we give back. Long before applause, which is a late and rather conventional invention, there was the gleeful posture, the giggle, the leaning in and the expectant smile. Visible delight is a strange sort of currency. It is minted freely and in abundance, it has no exchange rate, and it lasts only as long as the pleasure that earns it. But it changes hands all the same.

Some years ago I argued that value is not something we find in things but something that appears in practices of exchange: two mismatched appetites meeting, each with something the other wants. Entertainment fits this exactly. The performer offers skill and effort; the audience pays in delight and encouragement. And the encouragement does more than pay. It steers. The laugh (or even just the continued attention) tells the performer what worked, the performer refines it, the audience asks for more, and round it goes. That is how skill gets refined far beyond anything practical need would ever demand. Nobody needed my roar to be better. My son simply wanted to hear it again, and I gave it willingly, with pleasure.

Now consider two close contenders. Bonobos are famously more tolerant and playful than their chimpanzee cousins. They play far more as adults and use play to defuse tension, and some researchers argue that they have, in effect, domesticated themselves by selecting against aggression. Dogs, meanwhile, were domesticated by us, bred for fifteen thousand years or more for their attentiveness to human beings. They follow our pointing better than chimpanzees do. They read our delight and work to earn more of it, repeating the trick that got the laugh. And yet neither, so far as anyone has shown, sits as an audience. A bonobo plays, but does not sit back to watch others play for the pleasure of watching. A dog performs for our delight, but never returns the favour. Show a dog a game and it wants to join in fully. It cannot help itself. The exchange runs one way.

My son, by contrast, was soon roaring back at me in a calibrated interchange. Michael Tomasello calls this role-reversal imitation: the child who is tickled learns to tickle. Performer and audience are not fixed positions but seats that can be swapped, and to swap them you have to have sat in both. The performer knows what delights because they have been delighted. The audience knows what to encourage because they have had a go themselves.

But there is something more in the audience's seat, and I think it is the hinge of the whole thing. To be an audience is to refrain. To hold back from joining in, from intervening, from rushing the stage. To sit still, to watch from the sidelines, to peek, to steal a glance. This is not passivity; it is an achievement, and a hard-won one. Anyone who has taken a small child to the theatre knows how hard it is to sit still while something wonderful is happening, and pantomime is so beloved partly because it licenses the bursting out: "He's behind you!" Stendhal tells of a soldier in Baltimore who, in 1822, shot the actor playing Othello to save Desdemona. Whether or not it actually happened, the story is told because it's a clear failure of restraint: the spectator who could not stay a spectator, the human version of the dog that has to join in.

It's worth adding that this is not the same as an animal watching from cover. A cat in the long grass holds perfectly still, but it holds still in order to pounce. Its restraint is a means to an action of which it is a fully realised part. The audience holds still with nothing to follow but delight. The cat waits to strike; the audience waits only to see. Once again, it's the difference between participation and spectatorship.

Why does this matter? Because only from outside a frame can you grasp it as a frame. The participant lives inside the game. The spectator sees it as a game, with its occasions and roles and turns, its beginnings and endings, its traditions, its rules. And once you can see the frame, you can start to see something else: that what a thing is can depend not on what it is like but on where, when and how it relates to its wider context. A pretence of anger can look almost exactly like the real thing. What makes it a pretence isn't in the behaviour; it's in the setting, the occasion, the shared understanding of everyone present. Pretence is where we first learn that context can do work that often pays a hefty dividend.

Symbols need exactly this. Nothing about the word "cat" ties it to cats, and no amount of looking at the word will confirm it. A symbol holds only because those who use it can rely on one another to keep it in place, without checking it each time against the thing itself. That isn't resemblance worn thin. It's a different footing altogether.

This, I suspect, is why the development from mimicry to symbols so often looks like a gradual and continuous slide. It's easy to imagine resemblance thinning out, gesture by gesture, until only convention remains. But a thinner resemblance is only ever a sketchier match. What symbols need is something else: the ability to hold back, to wait, to carry on without confirmation. And that is just what audiences and performers teach each other. The audience learns to withhold its delight: to sit silent in the dark, to save its appreciation for a bigger payoff. The performer learns to carry on regardless, trusting that the pleasure is there even when nothing shows it. And these are only the crude beginnings. Much of what an audience feels, being impressed, moved or edified, has no behavioural expression of its own at all, which is presumably where applause comes in: one conventional gesture standing in for all of them. Sometimes the performer's reward arrives long after the room has emptied, as a review, a pay cheque or an invitation to perform again. By then delight has become something else entirely: a token, a sum, a promise. Knowing that you are bringing pleasure with no evidence of it in front of you is, I suspect, something no other animal does. A dog that gets no reaction soon gives up the trick. A storyteller facing a silent room keeps going. The pleasure is no less real for being inconspicuous. Getting there takes creatures who can stand outside a frame, and that takes creatures who can sit and watch.

It also gives us good reason to be cautious about attributing symbols to other species, and not out of any prejudice about brains. A dog that comes running at the word "walkies" is answering a cue, not sustaining a symbol. Dogs have intelligence, attentiveness, a shared form of life and millennia of selection in our favour, and they still have only one side of the exchange. What they lack is not a faculty but a practice: the practice of sitting on both sides of the frame.

We are, I think, uniquely an audience species. We gather in thousands to watch other people kick a ball, sit in the dark to watch shadows move across a screen, and laugh more at cartoons when we laugh together. It is easy to dismiss all of this as mere entertainment. But the word has an older meaning, of holding something between us, keeping it in mind, giving it room. To entertain an idea is to hold it without being taken in by it, to watch it from the side and see what it does. That is exactly what my son learned to do with a roar.

Loveless Promiscuity

When philosophers call a concept promiscuous, they don't mean it's sleeping around, but they do mean it has the potential to wreck certain relationships by spreading its consequences without due concern or consideration. The relationships that matter in philosophy are the ones a concept keeps with its neighbours, for example the relation between the concepts of image and reflection, information and cause, presence and absence. A carefully handled concept is respectful of those contrasts and doesn't switch their bed partners. A promiscuous one is less fussy about whom it goes home with, and the trouble isn't any single encounter but the cumulative damage.

Psychologists have a lovely example. Ask young children why rocks are pointy and many will tell you it's so that animals have something to scratch their itches on. Clouds are for raining, and the sun is for lighting us up and keeping us warm. Deborah Kelemen, who studied this, called it "promiscuous teleology": the idea that things exist for some end or goal (telos is Greek for "end"), applied to anything. It's charming in a five-year-old, but notice what it does. If everything has a purpose, then saying a spade is for digging no longer tells you anything special about spades or digging. A concept only does useful work when there are things it doesn't apply to. There are counterfeit coins only because there are genuine ones, and if everything were an image, say, the word would have no work left to do, no contrasts to make, no conceptual itches to scratch.

Some years ago Jonathan Trigg reviewed Alva Noë's Varieties of Presence. Noë had argued that perceptual presence is a matter of availability: things are present to us when we know how we would have to move to bring them into view. He went so far as to say that a friend living abroad is very faintly present to him, perceptually, because he has a sense of what he would have to do to see him. Trigg's reply was simple and devastating. If that were right, "the whole perceptible universe would be faintly perceptually present to me at any moment, since I have, at any moment, a 'sense' of what I would have to do to 'come to grips' with any particular bit of it (get in a space ship etc. etc.)." And he added, drily, that he suspected Noë might take this "as an engaging 'discovery'." I was struck by this, because I'd arrived at the same reductio by a different route, in a piece I've been writing in the form of a playful letter to the late Bertrand Russell. In the first chapter of his shortest book, Russell walks around his table and concludes that its shape and colour vary with his viewpoint, so that what we see is not the real table. But if an object that fills our view recedes to a vanishing point, then it follows that everything else must grow to fill the space it vacates. You can't have one isolated change without the whole universe changing to accommodate it. In both cases a perfectly reasonable thought, applied to its logical limit, ends up taking in everything. That's promiscuity, and however entertaining and seductive it is at first, it always does damage in the end. Home-wreckers are at least somewhat more local in their infidelities.

So I was interested to find Noë, in a recent lecture on love and consciousness, insisting that pictures are made, not found: they are artifacts, with makers and histories. So far so good. But he goes on to say that every picture implicitly "comes with a caption," as if what a picture is of depended on what someone might say about it, and he endorses the art historian Anne Hollander's claim that "the picture gives the standard by which the direct awareness is assessed." I think they are both wrong. People set and settled the standard long before anyone reached for a picture. What a picture is of usually needs no caption at all, and while pictures sometimes serve well enough when we check what we see, they were never the standard. When a dispute needs settling, it is the method closest to reality that settles it, not the most sophisticated form of representational artifice. Disregard that important point and a judge and jury might disabuse you even before the satirists do. 

The real trouble, though, comes when Noë insists that pictures must be distinguished from images, and that images are natural phenomena. "They are very common. Indeed, they're cheap." There is an image of the sky in the surface of a pond. There is an image on the retina, though nobody ever sees it. And then the floodgates open: "it's not unreasonable, I think, to imagine that every point in space is a point to which rays of light focus and thus can be thought of as creating images. Images that don't matter." That's an infinity of images invoked and summarily dismissed in one stroke of loveless disregard.

Images that don't matter, at every point in space. This is promiscuity of cosmic proportions, and it's exactly the same error Trigg caught in 2013. Consider the reflection in the pond. There is no single image lying on the water waiting to be found. What you see there depends entirely on where you stand, how high your eyes are, the angle of the light, the stillness of the surface and the aperture you look through. Wait a moment or move a step and it's a different reflection. Bring a second person and there are two. Put a camera on a tripod and there's a third. The reflection isn't a thing in or on the pond at all. It's a state of affairs: sky, water, light and a viewer arranged in a particular way. Multiply the possible viewers by every point in space in just one chosen instant and you already have infinitely many "images," none of which anyone sees and none of which, by Noë's own admission, matters. A word stretched that far has stopped meaning anything. The retinal "image," which no one has ever seen or could see, is the most neglected of them all: the lovechild of a brief affair between optics and pictorial practice, and pressed into the service of misleading theory.

The difference between a reflection and an image is worth spelling out, because ordinary speech blurs it. If you see your lover standing behind you in the mirror, it is them you see, not an image of them, however casually we might say we caught their image in the glass. Try to kiss that image, as we might kiss a photograph of someone we love, and you won't even find yourself kissing their reflection, only the cold hard surface of the mirror, with your own reflection staring back in disappointment.

Reflection is ordinary and widespread, so Noë isn't wrong that it's very common. But he doesn't even attempt to distinguish between specular reflection, the mirror-like kind we see in a still pond, and diffuse reflection, the scattering of light from every matte surface around us. Most of the light that reaches our eyes is diffuse, and diffuse light forms no image at any point in space. It arrives from every direction at once, and only an aperture or a lens can sort it into a projection. Light doesn't simply "focus" at every point in space; something has to focus it. And even then it only ever does so by degrees, as anyone who has spent time buried in a little optics knows. Every aperture and every lens blurs what it projects: a lens brings one distance into focus and softens the rest, and even its sharpest plane is softened by diffraction. Noë's perfect points of focus, scattered throughout space, are something no optics has ever delivered. It's an enticing picture, all twinkle and aftershave, but it won't survive the morning after.

The contrast with the projection inside a camera obscura is also telling, because that is extremely rare in nature outwith eyes, apart from the odd dappled shadow beneath a tree, where gaps between the leaves throw little discs of sunlight onto the ground. When light is channelled through an aperture into a darkened chamber, with a wall or screen to catch it, the result is what made it possible to capture, fix and share photographic images. But the projection itself is live in a way no image ever is. It changes as the scene changes, moment by moment. Images are fixed in a medium; reflections and projections are not. That's why we trust a mirror, or the light thrown through a pinhole, in a way we never quite trust an image, even a live moving image, which is itself necessarily mediated by a succession of fixed stills.

The irony is that Noë has the tool to put this right in the very same lecture. His second distinction is between relations and relationships. Relations, he says, are cheap and hold in spite of whatever anyone thinks: being older than the hills, say, or the solar system for that matter. Relationships, on the other hand, are made, fragile and hard-won. By his own lights, then, an optical projection is a relation, cheap, everywhere and unattended. But what makes something an image, as the rest of us would contend, is a relationship: someone looking, using, comparing and sometimes making. The same goes for perceiving itself: the ability to communicate our perceptions, as many animals clearly do, is what distinguishes perceiving from mere sensing. The meaning of "image" is in our language and not something he can simply redefine in order to seduce us into his way of thinking. Noë mistakes the projector beam for the image it projects. The word itself comes from pictorial practice, and it brings that practice with it wherever it goes. Had Noë applied his distinction between relations and relationships to his distinction between images and pictures, his countless images that don't matter would have been put to bed before they were even conceived.

And love? Noë argues that consciousness is the work of making relationships, and that love is the dedication to that work. Sure, making, negotiating and maintaining relationships, largely mediated by acts of communication, is what being a social species amounts to. But even our most benign communications aren't indiscriminate, and nor is love. Indiscriminate intimacy is how nasty infections spread, and love and monogamy may well have been favoured, at least in part, because they kept infections at bay. A lover who loves everyone loves no one in particular, and a concept that takes in everything picks out nothing. Noë himself raises the awkward question, whether we must then love everything we are conscious of, even what we hate, and leaves it hanging for a chapter still to be written. In the discussion afterwards he remarks, in passing, that a computer "can never have an itch it can't scratch." True enough. But a concept that scratches every itch in sight has no itches left of its own. The answer is in the title of his own talk. Love is selective, effortful and faithful to its object. Promiscuity is none of these, which is why there's no love in it.

Sources:

Chris T. Bauch and Richard McElreath, "Disease dynamics and costly punishment can foster socially imposed monogamy," Nature Communications 7 (2016).

Jonathan Trigg, review of Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence, Essays in Philosophy 14:2 (2013), 303–322.

Deborah Kelemen, "Why Are Rocks Pointy? Children's Preference for Teleological Explanations of the Natural World," Developmental Psychology (1999).

Alva Noë, "Love's Work: Consciousness and Love," Forum Humanum Lecture, The New School for Social Research, New York, 5 September 2025. Video here on YouTube