Chronotope

Daumier's Gargantua

Bakhtin in his famous study of Rabelais did the most to clarify the larger, metaphysical implications of the return of Rabelais in Bohemian Paris. Bakhtin argues that Rabelais is the exemplar of a folkloric, popular attitude that he names the laugh. The chronotope or time-space figure anchoring this world view and serving as its measure is the material, even grotesque, human body, the body in all of its corporeal vulgarity of copulation, defecation, the processes of living and dying. This time-space image is profoundly affirming in its embracing of the organic cycle of life, from birth to death and around again. “The extraordinary force of laughter in Rabelais, its radicalism, is explained predominantly by its deep-rooted folkloric base, by its link with the elements of the ancient complex – with death, the birth of new life, fertility and growth. This is real world-embracing laughter, one that can play with all the things of this world – from the most insignificant to the greatest, from distant things to those close at hand. This connection on the one hand with fundamental realities of life, and on the other with the most radical destruction of all false, verbal and ideological shells that had distorted and kept separate these realities, is what so sharply distinguishes Rabelaisian laughter from the laughter of other practitioners of the grotesque, humor, satire and irony” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination).

Julia Kristeva, who was one of the earliest and closest readers of Bakhtin, took her cue from this metaphysical laugh to characterize the French avant-garde writers (Lautreamont and Mallarme in particular) as accomplishing this transformation of laughter as device and method into a logic and ontology. “The practice of the text is a kind of laughter whose only explosions are those of language. The pleasures obtained from the lifting of inhibitions is immediately invested in the production of the new. Every practice that produces something new (a new device) is a practice of laughter: it obeys laughter’s logic and provides the subject with laughter’s advantages. When practice is not laughter, there is nothing new” (Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language).

Smoke Without Mirrors

Sapeck's "Mona Lisa with a Pipe" (1887) is emblematic of the attitude that is the "Spirit of Montmartre."  The attitude is fumisme, used to name the mocking humor that characterized the cabaret scene of bohemian Paris.  The anchoring term is the verb fumer (to smoke), but with a usage in agriculture, "to manure."  A fumiste is chimney sweep, with slang extension to name a joker, crackpot, fraud.  A "wit" is different from a fumiste, a distinction used to clarify the intent of Sapeck's illustrations.

Whereas the former made fun of idiots in terms that they were not always able to understand, the fumiste accepts the ideas of the idiot and expresses their quintessence. . . . The fumiste avoids discussions of ideas, he does not set up a specific target, he adopts a posture of withdrawal that makes all distinctions hazy, and he internalizes Universal Stupidity by postulating the illusory nature of values and of the Beautiful, whence his denial of the established order and of official hierarchies.  From this point of view, which is that of the sage, the dandy, the observer, and the skeptic, everything has the same value, everything is one and the same thing (Daniel Grojnowski, in The Spirit of Montmartre:  Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905).

 This particular image helps specify the context of Routine as a concept formed to function within the apparatus of electracy.  Our argument is that Paris is to electracy what Athens was to literacy (in general).  The cabaret is the "Academy" of electracy, and this analogy between cabaret and academy may be developed extensively to define a template for an image metaphysics (the analogy guiding this project).  Cabaret entertainment institutionalizes and provides material support in the new conditions of "Street" for the invention of a new seat (see) of culture.  The equivalent for literacy is the attitude of questioning, of materialist mathematics, that evolved into the scientific method and the whole Gestell of utilitarian techno-science over the historical life of literacy.

An immediate point of interest is the background that Sapeck's Mona Lisa provides for Duchamp's more famous readymade (the mustachioed Mona Lisa), composed much later.  The curious might wonder about the choice of iconic image to profane, and one latent connection is indexed in the term fumisme.  The hazy smoke associated with this attitude resonates with one of the important terms used to identify Leonardo's style:  sfumato.

Sfumato is a term coined by Leonardo da Vinci to refer to a painting technique which overlays translucent layers of color to create perceptions of depth, volume and form. In particular, it refers to the blending of colors or tones, so subtly that there is no perceptible transition. In Italian sfumato means "blended" with connotations of "smoky" and is derived from the Italian word fumo meaning 'smoke'. Leonardo described sfumato as 'without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke'.One of the best examples of a sfumato painting is the Mona Lisa

Some other associations to be developed further:  That the emergence of cabaret arts in late-nineteenth-century Paris was done explicitly in opposition to the official "Academy" of art.  A question:  is the fumiste pose a dramatization intended to bury the Cartesian version of selfhood and subject, whose conceptual persona is the idiot (as D&G explain)?

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).

                            

"Laugh" Iconed

Appropriation in the context of electracy is a device for the formation of image metaphysics. Pop media is to electracy what natural language was to Greek philosophy. Philosophy formed practices of literate metaphysics as a second-order system based on written Greek. Image metaphysics similarly is extracted from mass media discourse. Here is an example of isolating a pop signifier.



Thanks to Geof Carter for this suggestion.