Routine addresses well-being through attitude. "The biolinguistic conditions of so-called 'evil' are the same biolinguistic conditions that animate 'virtue,'" Virno says. "They both feed off the uncertainty experienced in the face of 'that which can be different from the way it is' [Aristotle's ethics]." The axis of Aesthetic Reason (of pleasure-pain, or joy-sadness) supplements Practical Reason at this contingent moment of choice. Agamben states the question within the frame of a philosophical tradition, represented by Spinoza.
The Irreparable is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being. States of things are irreparable, whatever they may be: sad or happy , atrocious or blessed. How you are, how the world is --that is the Irreparable... According to Spinoza the two forms of the irreparable, confidence or safety (securitas) and despair (desperatio), are identical from this point of view. What is essential is only that every cause of doubt has been removed, that things are certainly and definitively thus; it does not matter whether this brings joy or sadness. As a state of things, heaven is perfectly equivalent to hell even though it has the opposite sign. (But if we could feel confident in despair, or desperate in confidence, then we would be able to perceive in the state of things a margin, a limbo that cannot be contained within it). The root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is. Joy or sadness that arises because the world is not what it seems or what we want it to be is impure or provisional. But in the highest degree of their purity, in the so be it said to the world when every legitimate cause of doubt and hope has been removed, sadness and joy refer not to negative or positive qualities, but to a pure being-thus without any attributes. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community.
Agamben is glossing the "consolation" of philosophy, the contingent relationship between how the world is and our attitude within that world. Wisdom proposes that we work on our attitude, with the recommended answer to the transcendental question of stand (at least up to modernity) being
ataraxy (suppression of desire). Routine takes up this question of stand or orientation (attitude) anew, appropriating for the inference procedure of conduction in electracy the stand-up routine as an image of thought.
Attitude is the heartbeat of an act. Material cannot be emotionally neutral. Your subject matter has to disgust you, pain you, thrill you, because audiences don't respond to words, they respond to feelings. Every piece of material has a specifi attitude, such as "I'm worried about..." or "I love..." or "I"m angry about..." This Margaret Smith piece comes out of how she feels about her manager: "I hate my manager. He's always giving me advice like 'Wear red libstick up there. Look pretty.' What if I'm not funny and it's coming out of these big old red lips? It's like being a crummy outfielder with a paiseley mitt." Judy Carter, Stand-Up Comedy: The Book.
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