Simon Critchley on Comic Thought

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Our CATTt is derived from the one implicit in WIP?  Modernist arts are referenced throughout this text as a relay for understanding the "non-objective" (non-mimetic) treatment of ideas in the history of philosophy.  The "Documents of Contemporary Art" series includes a collection on "The Artist's Joke," which might have worked.  Duchamp anchors this collection, as he does the one we used on "Appropriation."  Pressed by an interviewer to accept sophisticated hermeneutic readings of his Readymades (such as the geometry book left out in the rain), Duchamp replied, "It was a joke.  A pure joke.  To denigrate the solemnity of a book of principles" (cited in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art).

Appropriation is a twofer, since it includes the bit strategy while foregrounding the logical operation of detournement.  The CATTt context frames the collage method first in relation to the quarrel between philosophy and commerce.  Advertising already uses appropriate inference, including bachelor machine juxtapositions and fallacies of ambiguity and relevance.  The apparatus context shows that the flow of mass or pop media discourse is the "natural language" of electracy (pop media : electracy :: inscribed Greek epics : literacy).  Appropriation is electrate "writing" (designing).  The categories of image metaphysics are emerging through this modernist arts practice of the photogram (the principle of "taking" pictures).  The second point is that appropriation in general, and detournement in particular, extend the logic of joke-work fully into conduction as the fourth inference principle (the one that electracy adds to the -ductions invented within literacy).  The instruction from the CATTt is to introduce detournement into the joke mechanism, as the ultimate device for turning up the unthought.  Routine distinguishes its direction (attitude), its -vert on the plane of immanence, as diversion (not conversion, perversion, subversion, or adversion).

One example illustrating the logic is Jeff Wall on Dan Graham's Homes for America (1966-67).

The magazine pieces are structured as small, ironically insignificant defeats for liberationist ideas, as "defeatist interventions" in the mechanisms of ideological dominations.  They are aimed at interrupting the flow of standardized, falsified representation and language, and inducing a "mini-crisis" for the reader or viewer by means of the inversions they create.  Reflected in the provocations and interventions characteristic of 1960s Situationism,  in which an unexpected and confrontational gesture interrupts the established rhythm of relationships in a specific context, and induces a form of contestation, paradox or crisis, this approach thereby exposes the forms of authority and domination in the situation, which are normally imperceptible or veiled. The most notable artistic image of this is the unexpected "void" or "rupture" in this seamlessly designed social surface, and conceptualism's origins are filled with such blanks, erasures, tears and cuts [,,,]  It aggravates Pop irony by means of humour noir, and attempts to elicit a recognition of the terroristic aspects of the normalized environment of images, things, spaces and mechanisms (Appropriation, Evans, Ed., 43).

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.

Conceptual Stand-Up

The function of tale is as vehicle for the CATTt inventories.  Users encounter the emergent poetics of the invention through some form that partly demonstrates and partly explains the new method (or concept).  Plato introduced his new concept of "method" in the form of "dialogue."  Commentators remind us that Plato invented this form, but we recognize the heuretic practice in it:  the scene of Socrates conversing with interlocutors is an interface, embedding the encounter with dialectic in a familiar situation.  Dialectic (method) is a core practice of literacy, unfamiliar in the oral culture of Athens, transitioning from orality to literacy.  In the terms of our Theory (D&G), "Socrates" is Plato's Conceptual Persona.  Part of the nature and purpose of "method" (the concept) is communicated by the aura associated with Socrates as an iconic type:  the gadfly.  The image of thought associated with this icon is complex, including the representation of Socrates as a sophist in Aristophanes's The Clouds.  D&G provide many examples of this holistic effect of the Conceptual Persona portraying the image of thought.

Kierkegaard's "knight of the faith," he who makes the leap, or Pascal's gambler, he who throws the dice, are men of a transcendence or a faith.  But they constantly recharge immanence: they are philosophers or, rather, intercessors, conceptual personae who stand in for these two philosophers and who are concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with the infinite immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists (WiP?, 74).

Here is the first dimension through which we understand Routine as our concept:  the image of thought evoked by the figure of a stand-up comic.  "Stand-up comic" is for us what "gambler" was for Pascal's thought:  a vehicle evoking the tenor that is Routine.  The image of thought shows the attitude that frames thinking through Routine.  "Attitude" concerns the state of mind within which the thought happens, concerning belief or desire (for example) directed towards our Target (the problem in the world, the disaster).  Taken as a whole, or as a position of enunciation within the culture, comedy implies a certain attitude towards reality, which is the answer Routine gives to a fundamental question of philosophy -- the transcendental question (where are we when we think?).  Alenka Zupancic offers an insightful description of the comedic stand, relevant to Routine.

There is something very real in comedy's supposedly unrealistic insistence on the indestructible, on something that persists, keeps reasserting itself and won't go away, like a tic that goes on even though its "owner" is already dead. In this respect, one could say that the flaws, extravagances, excesses, and so-called human weaknesses of comic characters are precisely what account for their not being "only human."  More precisely, they show us that what is "human" exists only in this kind of excess over itself" (Zupancic, The Odd One In, 49).

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.

Eventence

One of the challenges of our Theory (D&G) is to construct a concept for thinking from the collective position of event.  Virno (on Target) contributes the procedure we are testing in Routine.

In the actual experience of talking, the road sign is language as a system of signs, while the different ways in which one can behave in the presence of these signs has to do with a universe of discourse language (with "the activity of the speaker who puts language into action," Benveniste: 256).  The distinction between the semiotic plane (sign) and the semantic plane (discourse), developed by Benveniste corresponds in many ways to the distinction between the normative plane and the applicative plane.  The semiotic system "exists in and of itself; it establishes the reality of language, but it does not require particular applications; the sentence, instead, the semantic expression, is solely particular"  (256).  The sentence is not a "habitual event"; rather, it is a unique, "evanescent" event (Virno, 105).

We may not "think" event directly, but write it, and receive it thus from ourselves (middle voice).  The crucial insight developed throughout Multitude is the focus on this moment of exchange, the twist in the moebius band of language, marking the imbrication of drives (body, natural regularity) in language (grammar, rule).  Julia Kristeva used similar vocabulary while naming the semiotic dimension "chora" (a term requiring further development elsewhere).  The point is that jouissance (bliss, blissence) associated with originary unconscious experiences of satisfaction (in psychoanalytic theory), are carried within discourse imbricated in the semiotic register of words.  Given the importance of the pleasure/pain axis to electracy, the usefulness of Virno's argument cannot be overstated. The value of Multitude is its foregrounding of the joke effect as announcing exactly the event of interference between the two registers.

The joke is a discourse--particular, unique, evanescent--that gives a reckoning of the difference between the semiotic system and the universe of discourse.  The comic effect derives, often, exactly from that coming and going between the two planes; inside one sentence one can see the diversity of the statute of the very same lexical entity, depending on whether it is interpreted as a sign, or as part of the discourse ("How's it going?" asks the blind man of the lame man; "Just as you see," the latter answers") (106).

In short, the event of Routine happens in the bit, in language and not only there, but in image discourse.