The result is that the audience becomes complicit in a "new reality" in which the string of nonsense Watts just invented is "common knowledge." Because Watts has the microphone, because he's speaking in the accent of a highly-educated Brit, because it's a TED talk, and because Watts is relatively famous, him saying something is "common knowledge" creates a touch of "dramatic irony" for us-as we know that the reality we're living in, in which what Watts has said is nonsense, is not the reality Watts is living in in the moment he claims otherwise.
Here, he appends the phrase "Common knowledge, but important nonetheless" to a string of words in varying codes that make no sense whatsoever. Watts is known for telling stories that include hard data and then changing a datum the second time it's referenced, forcing the listener to decide whether the first number provided, the second, or neither is true. The key to reality-shifting is to not acknowledge you're doing it. Elsewhere, Watts slips in a made up word ("collapsation") and rhymes it with "sensation," as if to say that even words that mean nothing can feel right (because they interact nicely with other words) or mean something to us when they shouldn't (as the ear hears "collapse" for "collapsation," and therefore doesn't balk at the new coinage as it should).ģ. Watts also elevates the formality of his diction by saying "unto ourselves," yet another example of how sometimes the gravitas behind a speech is as convincing as the words of which it's comprised. In the clip above, we hear the words "self-interest," "topography," "future," "memory," "sensation," and "mirror," all of which are calibrated to sound as though they carry communicative content when in fact, in this context, they lay claim to none whatsoever. Instead, he deliberately chooses his words for their portentousness-that is, based on how commonly we find them in monologues (academic or demotic) that actually do intend to make "sense"-and then combines them randomly to remind us how easily such maneuvers can fool us. For instance, what he offers his audience at this point in the performance isn't psychobabble or some other recognizable form of contemporary nonsense. Welcome to the Internet Age, writ large.īut Watts isn't being unintelligible in the usual way. And the truth is, the audience will never find out one way or another. That's why, even when he "exits" his string of linguistic code-switches to speak authoritatively in a false British accent, we find him addressing a topic entirely inconsistent with the occasion: He speaks of having just discussed a cultural "convention" in detail, though as that's impossible to confirm, and indeed seems highly unlikely, it casts doubt on the possibility that anything he said previously was relevant or coherent.
Even the integrity and fidelity of the codes Watts is using are in doubt, meaning that even if his audience understood a number of those codes, and even if they looked beneath the patina of coherence Watts has layered atop his monologue, they'd still feel the anxiety of uncertainty-which is exactly how Watts wants it. How do we know Watts is speaking "authentically" in the codes he seems to be using? How do we know if he's speaking in "actual" Russian, Spanish, French, et al.? And the answer is: We don't. Not so fast, though, the longtime Watts-watcher will say. Watts also deliberately maintains the wall between performer and audience that most artists spend the first few minutes of their stage performance tearing down. Instead, he aims to embody the twenty-first century information consumer, within whom countless unbreakable codes that are obscure to all listeners are crafted into an authentic and "whole" identity nonetheless. By starting his performance in a language other than English, Watts telegraphs to his audience that communication in the conventional sense is not his primary aim, nor is deconstructing language. This is an important metamodernist technique whereas a postmodernist would switch between codes her audience understands, the better to emphasize how much content gets lost in translation, the metamodernist switches between indecipherable codes to underscore that it falls to us to make millions of communicative threads cohere. Watts switches seamlessly between languages (Russian, Italian, Spanish, French, accented English), but it's likely that most of his code-switching goes right over the heads of his audience, given that most of the codes he's using are unknown to them.
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