Joke Mechanism

A joke, Virno states, “interrupt[s] the circular flux of experience” (73). It articulates something fundamental about the practical know-how needed to apply a rule effectively in a given circumstance (73):

Jokes have a lot to do with one of the most insidious problems of linguistic praxis: how to apply a rule to a particular case. They have a lot to do, on the other hand, precisely with dangers or the difficulties and uncertainties that sometimes come up in the moment of application. (73)

A rule can be applied in many different ways to a given circumstance. It is the variability of the application, Virno writes, that can lead to changes in the base logic of the rule itself (73). He calls human creativity “subnormative: it manifests itself uniquely, that is, in the lateral and inappropriate paths that happen to open themselves to us just as we are forcing ourselves to conform to a determined norm” (73-74).

The traditional inference patterns that validate or invalidate deductive and inductive reasoning are interrupted and spun in different (unpredictable) directions in joke logic:

the logical form of jokes consists of a deductive fallacy, or rather of an unmerited inherited inference, or of an incorrect use of a semantic ambiguity. For example: attributing to the grammatical subject all the properties pertaining to its predicate; interchanging the part for the whole or the whole for the part; instituting a symmetrical relation between antecedent and consequent; treating a metalinguistic expression as though it were a language object. (74)

It is only when established norms of thinking, reasoning, and experiencing are ruptured that we can see an underlying irony in the repetitive practices that hold us blindly in place. Virno associates this opening or rupture with the disorientation of living beings outside of the state of nature—a disorientation that holds a human being perpetually “in a state of potentiality” (18). The paths of inference that guide deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning in literacy are the established norms that figure how we speak, think, and experience ourselves among each other in the world. In relation to our goal of thinking the unthought for a concept called routine, Virno helps us to see language as a logical (perfectly) articulated system that is essentially blind to the ruptures (the problem/our public policy issues) that are (or can be) a byproduct of its logic (as we use it in literacy, not necessarily language itself). Without belittling my public policy issue, the logical equivalent of it in language is the joke or fallacious argument that needs another system of reasoning (or seeing) to recognize that the logic is working correctly against itself and, in doing so, creating the logical space for something new. An example we saw in class was the famous logical fallacy scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

Virno writes

All jokes, including the simple play on words based on alliteration, are modes of reasoning, with premises and conclusions (regardless of whether they are explicit or implicit). They are, however, formally erroneous modes of reasoning, whose outcome depends upon unfounded presuppositions, semantic ambiguities, defective correlations, arbitrary amplification or arbitrary limitation of elements to be considered, shameless transgression of the principle of the ‘excluded middle (principium tertii exclusi or tertium non datur). The logical form of jokes seems to be, therefore, an argumentative fallacy. Jokes resemble apparent syllogisms or incorrect syllogisms. Apparent syllogisms, if they originate from false premises, that is to say, from simple hypothetical endoxa, drawing conclusions opposite to those of actually viable endoxa. (132)

When fallacious reasoning ceases to be “considered incorrect or false (in the rigorous logical sense)” it is subject to the electrate logic of the fourth inference pattern, conduction. Conduction “crosses all semantic categories following aesthetic or formal signifiers wherever they go, as in dream-work or poetry (condensation, displacement): chance, juxtaposition, (free) association” (Ulmer, Email, 6 April 2010).

Andy Warhol, Sigmund Freud (1980)

Freud’s conception of dream-work is concerned with an analysis of a dream process not its contents. The concealed wish behind a dream is expressed unconsciously in four ways:

1. Condensation: the combination of many different ideas.
2. Displacement: the unconscious transfer of an intense emotion from one object to another (OED).
3. Symbolization: transformation of thought into visual elements.
4. Secondary revision: making something whole (story-like) out of the condensed and displaced aspects of dream work.

The type of unconscious logic associated with Freud’s dream-work is important in electracy because it correlates with an unfixed dimension that operates outside of traditional forms of logic, in the realm of the signifier (free-signification), which enable the formation of semantic relationships solely by virtue of simultaneous or parallel presence. Relationships in this zone are not solely structured on semantic connections, but, as in dream-work, on processes, which opens logic (literally) to new, connective (conductive) realms: sound associations, “arbitrary juxtaposition[s that] turn[] out to be motivated,” “condensation, displacement” (Ulmer, Email, 6 April 2010), and chance (Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 195).

Virno, in the Target position of our CATTt, draws together the notion of endoxa represented in the Theory and Contrast components of the CATTt, by Deleuze and Guattari and Marchand, respectively, and helps us to see that assumptions, opinions, maxims, the common behaviour of humankind, don’t provide the vocabulary or systems of articulation to deal with exceptions that slip through the cracks and which are largely ignored in favor of governing norms. “His instruction is to test these rules . . . by introducing fallacious inference paths into the materials of [our public policy] debates” (Ulmer, Email, 6 April 2010).