Poisoning the Well

From Paolo Virno we adopted the strategy of exploiting the overlap between logical fallacies and joke work, in order to switch the figure ground relationship between rules and cases organizing our policy aporia.  In the case of my policy question (the Superfund site in Gainesville, Florida, involving the potential for pollution of the city well field), it is impossible to resist starting this experiment with the fallacy known as poisoning the well.

Fallacy Joke

This sort of "reasoning" involves trying to discredit what a person might later claim by presenting unfavorable information (be it true or false) about the person. This "argument" has the following form:

1. Unfavorable information (be it true or false) about person A is presented.
2. Therefore any claims person A makes will be false.

This sort of "reasoning" is obviously fallacious. The person making such an attack is hoping that the unfavorable information will bias listeners against the person in question and hence that they will reject any claims he might make. However, merely presenting unfavorable information about a person (even if it is true) hardly counts as evidence against the claims he/she might make. This is especially clear when Poisoning the Well is looked at as a form of ad Homimem in which the attack is made prior to the person even making the claim or claims.

The effectiveness of this fallacy may be seen in contemporary American politics.  Conservative talk show hosts and Tea Party movement activists have poisoned the well of the "lamestream media" (Palin) to the point that a significant percentage of citizens are immune to fact-checking rebuttals.  For example, no amount of evidence proving that President Obama was born in the United States (Hawaii) can stop "birther" error, because the media reporting the evidence are rejected in advance. 

Comedians such as Stephen Colbert already exploit the obvious potential for humour related to this frame of mind, and the tragic potential is also apparent.  The question in our context is to explore the electrate dimension of this phenomenon, to discover the affective ratios of nonsense for a politics and ethics of well-being.  Reason is not the measure of order in a dromosphere.

Rehearsal

Dean's instructions for creating a stand-up routine provide our "tale," showing us how to style the blog invention of a concept for conducting theory online.  The blog is not a finished routine, but a "rehearsal," the backstage planning and preparations.  For mnemonic purposes, Dean's advice is to locate our bits within a fully imagined situation.  The principle is that a bit is a particular situation and our response to it, dramatized as our own experience.  The heuretic rule is to substitute our own policy problem for the joke situation.  The joke mechanism, and the mining procedures for filling the slots of the mechanism, constitute inferential steps for thinking the unthought.

The joke mechanism consists of two stories, two interpretations of one situation.  To use a Margaret Smith version of one of Dean's examples, take the situation of Smith visiting her parents.  The parents wonder why she doesn't visit more often.  The cultural expectation guiding the first story concerns what is appropriate according to norms, etiquette, values:  families should respect and care for and about one another.  The connector (pivot, switch, hinge) prompting this norm (expectation) is "visit."  Dean's advice is to locate a connector open to a second interpretation, a different assumption.  This second assumption is Smith's ATTITUDE, the assumption of her persona, which is hostile to her family.  She tells a second story expressing this assumption:  "I would visit more often, but I can't get Delta to have its plane wait in my yard while I run in."  The mechanism as a whole is this conjunction of two stories around a shared term.  The instruction is to translate the family visit situation into the situation of our policy problem, in which we imagine ourselves as a participant with an attitude.

Here is where we modify Dean, to fit his advice into our CATTt.  A context is Virno, in that Dean's first story exemplifies practical reason, the application of rules to cases to guide judgment.  In fact the joke takes a Machiavellian approach to the cultural rules/expectations, one that is more cynical.  The second assumption in Smith's bit is that most families do not get along.  This assumption is just as familiar as the normative behavior, but violates decorum.  Freud might say this violation releases the energy used to repress this attitude, and so we laugh.  Zupancic noted that the unofficial attitude is familiar, and yet suprising when it appears.  The comedic stand, she says, is that when a husband returns home unexpectedly, one may assume that there is a lover hiding in the wife's closet.  In tragedy the husband (Othello) assumes this as well, but is wrong. 

The relevant point for our concept concerns its purpose of an inference leading to the unthought.  The unthought here must include the unofficial as well as the official expectations; that is, the attitude of our persona must itself be surprised.  The contribution of Analogy (Appropriation art) is responsible for producing this effect.  We learn about "appropriate" (noun) by appropriate (verb).  The potential addition to the mechanism is already sited when we note that Dean's mechanism relies primarily on fallacies of ambiguity (the connector is open to multiple interpretations).  The other major class of fallacy is that of relevance (red herring, ad hominem and the like).  The key point to note for now in documenting the rehearsal is this instruction to apply the generative mechanism not only to the expectations or assumptions of the policy debate, but also to the assumptions motivating your attitude to the debate.

Prudence as Joker

The primary instruction derived from Virno is based on his proposal to adopt logical fallacies (exploiting the structure of joke-work:  condensation, displacement, secondary elaboration) as sources of innovative inference practice in conditions of ethical/political crisis.  "Jokes and innovative action displace the 'rotational axis' of a form of life by means of an openly 'fallacious' conjecture, one that nonetheless reveals in a flash a different way of applying the rules of the game:  contrary to the way it seemed before, it is entirely possible to embark on a side path or to escape from Pharaoh's Egypt" (163).  The pragmatics of laughter and the forms that elicit it are guides to the exact site of interface, the moebius twist, crossing body and language.  The two slopes of language are hinged here, enabling discourse and jouissance to coexist in one practice.  Here is the point of departure for electrate ontology.  Literacy ontologized the semantic register of writing; electracy ontologizes the musical (choral) register.  It is the site of Lacan's letter/l'etre.

The logic of crisis is most evident in the articulation between instinctual apparatus and propositional structure, between drives and grammar.  Each attempt at delineating a different normative "substratum," though it unravels within wholly contingent sociopolitical circumstances, retraces and compounds, on a reduced scale, the passage from life in general to linguistic life.  Anomalous inferences are the precision instrument by virtue of which verbal thought, delineating a different normative "substratum," recalls, each time anew, the anthopogenetic passage.  Their anomaly lies in the manner in which language preserves within itself, though transfigured to the point of being barely recognizable, the original nonlinguistic drive (160).

it is worth a further citation, to make the Target instruction emphatic:  introduce a fallacy into the argumentation of your public policy debate.

The multiple use of the same material and the displacement of psychic accent are the two fundamental ways of reacting to the intensifying of chronic problems presented by the application of a rule to a particular case.  Furthermore:  these are the two ways in which,  in the process of their application, we return to the primary system of reference that is the "common behavior of mankind." Multiple use and displacement are the two main genres of fallacy and the primary genres of jokes.  However, as we have just seen, in jokes (as well as in the unusual application of a rule) fallacies have the value of counterfactual hypotheses, and therefore they take shape as heuristic procedures.  The two types of jokes (as well as productive fallacy) correspond to two types of creative action on a vast scale:  Entrepreneurial innovation; Exodus (146).

                            

Conducting Prudence

The instruction to be derived from Virno concerns practical reason:  drawing upon the lessons of the past to make a decision in the present situation promising the best outcome for the future well-being of the community.  Good judgment requires the virtue of phronesis, prudence.  Prudence is a virtue, meaning that it is a matter of disposition, a quality of character.  The practice of deliberative reason follows the paths of inference:  abducting from the particular conditions to the rules (an archive of maxims and proverbs representing the wisdom, the experience, of tradition and associated respected authorities).  The rules supplied the premises for deductions formulating hypothetical cases, which in turn inductively were applied to the situation.  The problem with practical reason today, Virno observes, is that there is not now, and never has been, a rule for applying the rule to a case.  The application requires a decision, and this decision represents the aporia of ethics.

The aporia is even more implacable than Virno admits, since in the sublime conditions of the industrial city the archive of maxims and proverbs recording the wisdom of collective experience lost all authority.  Moreover, the locus of causality disappeared from everyday life, to become accessible only to scientific expertise supported by technology.  Commerce filled the void, promoting through advertising the conversion of citizens to an entirely new state of mind, oriented along the axis of pleasure-pain.  Marchand cites a pronouncement made by one advertising agency in the 1920s to note the role commerce attempted to play:  "The product of advertising is public opinion; and in a democracy public opinion is the uncrowned king. It is the advertising agency's business to write the speeches from the throne of that king; to help his subjects decide what they should eat and wear; how they should invest their savings; by what courses they can improve their minds; and even what laws they should make, and by what faith they may be saved" (Marchand, 31).

Virno's proposal assumes that we are now living in conditions of a permanent "state of exception," in which the rules guiding judgment may be open to revision, to innovation, to testing against experience.  His suggestion to replace valid reasoning with the deliberate use of fallacies, in order to expose the enthymemes, the assumptions and values determining the ineffective deductions guiding decision-making, acknowledges the unconscious as a site of ethical decision unsuspected in premodern philosophy.  Ethics we now understand is beyond the reach of both reason and will.  Fallacies and joke-work are transitional forms manifesting the fourth mode of inference emergent within electracy:  conduction.

True Fallacies

As is often the case with Python humor, this demonstration of the relationship between fallacious inference and humor is based on historical fact.  The scene is based on the life of Matthew Hopkins, the most famous witch finder of his day, who traveled the counties of Essex, Sussex, Huntington, and Norfolk, examining females suspected of witchcraft (fetishism).  Hopkins' ultimate test was that of "swimming."  The hands and feet of the accused were tied together crosswise, after which she was wrapped in a sheet and tossed into a pond. If she sank she was deemed innocent (albeit drowned). If she floated she was deemed guilty and executed.  In one year Hopkins oversaw more than sixty deaths by this means (Ulmer, Electronic Monuments, p. 165).

In our context we notice that the informal syllogism performed in our scene relies upon certain assumptions (beliefs), about the nature of reality, for example, that there are witches.  We may be reminded of D&G's reference to thought as "a witch's flight."  The reference to the inquisitor indicates a need for "fleeing" more than "flying."

Then there is the eponymous "rock/doom" band.