Version Logic

Routine as a mode of inference (working conduction) engages version (-vert) as trace.  The stakes and opportunities of version (the directionality of attitude), the potentiality of turning in relation to problem on the plane of immanence, may be appreciated relative to the historical developments in the several practices and disciplines that exploit this register.  One example is the inference procedures systematized by categorical propositions.  Any textbook of logic covers the manipulations of the logical square (Aristotle), including conversion, obversion, and contraposition.

The converse of any categorical proposition is the new categorical proposition that results from putting the predicate term of the original proposition in the subject place of the new proposition and the subject term of the original in the predicate place of the new. Thus, for example, the converse of "No dogs are felines" is "No felines are dogs," and the converse of "Some snakes are poisonous animals" is "Some poisonous animals are snakes."

In order to form the obverse of a categorical proposition, we replace the predicate term of the proposition with its complement and reverse the quality of the proposition, either from affirmative to negative or from negative to affirmative. Thus, for example, the obverse of "All ants are insects" is "No ants are non-insects"

The contrapositive of any categorical proposition is the new categorical proposition that results from putting the complement of the predicate term of the original proposition in the subject place of the new proposition and the complement of the subject term of the original in the predicate place of the new. Thus, for example, the contrapositive of "All crows are birds" is "All non-birds are non-crows,"

 [Interactive Demo]

Interpellation

A familiar example of a vital anecdote associated with a concept is the scene of hailing offered by Louis Althusser.  The anecdote is relevant for us in showing another case of turning (-vert).

I shall then suggest that ideology "acts" or "functions" in such a way that it "recruits" subjects among the individuals (it recruits them al), or "transforms" the individuals into subjects by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing:  "Hey, you there!"  Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around.  By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.  Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was "really" addressed to him, and that "it was really him who was hailed" (and not someone else) [Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"].

Routine concerns the trace of turn, meaning not this or that version, but turning as such, the direction and directedness of attitude, and a temporal movement that includes at some point or site a pivot or switch, enabling or generating the experience of peripety and anagnorisis.

Taking Turns

Truth can only be defined on the plane [of immanence] by a "turning toward" or by "that toward which thought turns"; but this does not provide us with a concept of truth (WIP? 39).

Kenneth Burke provides some context for the turning (the -vert family of terms) enabled by "concept."  "Turn" is the rhetorical operation relevant to the "directionality" experienced through attitude.  In his study of St. Augustine's Confessions, generalized as The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke foregrounds the -vert family in relation to decision-making ("voting or purchasing, giving answers to questionnaires, taking of risks calculated on the basis of probability"). "I sometimes wonder whether the good Bishop of Hippo could ever have written that work were it not for the many Latin words that grow from this root, meaning turn." Augustine's moment of conversion to Christianity (the famous scene in Book VIII) is analyzed dramatistically:

There are the tense moments of decision in formal drama, when the protagonist debates whether to make a certain move, and finally makes the choice that shapes his destiny, though he still has to discover what that destiny is. . . . We are interested in the kind of decision, if it can be called decision at all:  the kind of development that usually takes place in the third act of a five-act drama.  Despite his great stress upon the will, and despite his extraordinary energy in theological controversy, Augustine seems to have felt rather that, at the critical moment of his conversion, something was decided for him.  Act III is the point at which some new quality of motivation enters.  And however active one may be henceforth, the course is more like a rolling downhill than like a straining uphill (Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion).

This moment of decision is taught as the turning point of the standard Hollywood screenplay, instructions for which may be found in countless primers on scriptwriting (coming in this genre at the end of the second act of a three-act script).  There is a narrative or dramatistic dimension in Routine, but "concept" separates, isolates, and develops as an alternative to any particular turn or direction, the pivot or switch site, the Archimedian lever of upon which turning as such depends.   Routine does for turn of attitude what peripety (peripeteia) does for drama.

Burke's analysis of the Confessions resonates with Virno's observation about virtue and evil exploiting the same rhetorical resources of language,  Augustine himself contrasts his con-version with the per-version of his pagan experience. "As regards Augustine's Confessions, the  most notable use of the vert- family is in the contrast between Book II, concerned with what he calls his adolescent perversity, in stealing pears (a Gidean acte gratuit), and Book VIII, that describes his conversion."

Simon Critchley on Comic Thought

Divertisements

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).