CATTt

Here is a survey of the CATTt resources developed in detail in the posts.  We need to add up all five sources, attune them among themselves, to see what the instructions are.  It is an experiment, meaning that we create instructions the best we can from the given resources, and then do what they tell us to do, and see what we learn from that process.  (Note:  the CATTt is updated for each seminar).  Our sequence is:
     Theory:  concept, needs conceptual persona and vital anecdote, to show figuratively (and literally) how to think the thought relative to a specific problem dimension.  Commerce, and hence cliche, stereotype, doxa, are the problems for thought.  The "concept" must introduce the unthought, not just for an individual, but at a collective level.
     Contrast:  shows how to work with persona and anecdote to model endoxal reasoning.  Cliches are the ersatz concepts of collective thought.  Cliches (endoxal figures) provide access to what goes without saying, readymade (off-the-rack) opinions, circulating the expectations and assumptions organizing cultural experience.   We are tracking this endoxal level of public or collective discourse.
     Target:  Our public policy issue also exists in this register of doxa:  the arguments addressing the various sides of an issue embody assumptions (beliefs and values, about how the world does and should work).  Virno tells us to notice the inference paths (deduction, induction) structuring our issue (the rules guiding the appropriate choices to form a case, a hypothesis, about proper action in a given situation).  His instruction is to test these rules (assumptions, maxims) by introducing fallacious inference paths into the materials of the debate.  The effect is to bring to the surface the assumptions/values structuring the arguments, in order to reflect on their validity, desirability, worth as norms of conduct.  Fallacies and Jokes work similarly, he observes, to make the point that this
counterfactual mode of thinking is already available and widely practiced, suggesting reason for optimism about the possibility of thinking otherwise, and even of the collectivity changing its mind.
     tale:  Dean gives us instructions for how a persona performs a vital anecdote structured by fallacious/joke reasoning.  We adopt his mechanism as our inference procedure for Routine, in order to do the work assigned by the other CATTt sources.  The fit is explicit, and the value of his painstaking explicitness (the joke mine) is the reminder that we ourselves are inscribed within the endoxal order.  We follow the steps to notice where the assumptions resides, in order to produce surprise by bait and switch.  To get a punch effect you need a set-up. What is set up is the expectation.  Most art form do this:  any movie you watch invokes your expectations (hopes and fears), which are the organs of identification (even in music, we "expect" the chord to be resolved).  Perhaps our blog persona could be that of persons without any sense of humor, attempting to compose a routine about our issue.   This could be funny in itself, especially since most of our topics are sensitive to issue of "correctness."  A key element of the persona form is that it includes both the assumptions of a topic (Target) AND the attitude of the persona towards it.
    Analogy:  Dean emphasized fallacies of ambiguity.  His primary device was to find a connector that had multiple interpretations, and select an interpretation different from the one expected within the doxa (the cliche or common place).  The other main category of fallacy concerns ir/relevance.  Virno refers to these two modalities as "entrepreneurial" and "exodus" (if memory serves?).   Appropriation, especially in the mode of detournement, introduces irrelevance as the preferred mechanism of surprise.  This art practice, coming to us from the movements of Dadaism et al, continues the thread introduced by Virno's invocation of Freud's joke-work, to carry us fully into the inference principle of conduction.  Conduction's path crosses all semantic categories following aesthetic or formal signifiers wherever they go, as in dream-work or poetry (condensation, displacement):  chance, juxtaposition, (free) association.  However, as we see from our source, artists exploit these opportunities for specific effects.  The forms themselves are semanticized (that is, the nature of the signifier itself carries meaning effects), and the arbitrary juxtaposition turns out to be motivated (that is, what logically is unrelated turns out to make a necessary connection after all).  Detournement, then, working with the existing endoxal discourse, provides the key to the effect of self-surprise.