Linguistic games with a scrap of an email

Virno uses the joke as a model for how human creativity, how innovation, works/is possible. "Jokes are the diagram for innovative action" (Virno, 74). Jokes make use of fallacy. At the end a section, he asks what it means that creativity is structured around faulty reasoning, around error. I'd like to suggest that all our linguistic games, all our communication is in some senses rooted in error. I quote an email I wrote in the character of Bishop Bishop in response to someone asking her whether or not it was possible to communicate with an image.

It isn't a consolation, but we misunderstand each other almost as often as we understand each other. Human communication (text, speech, body language, images, etc) is full of errors, gaps, glitches, misunderstandings.

There is a whole tradition of theater (the absurdists) that deal with the inability of humans to communicate. The work of Ionesco, Beckett, even Albee to some extent, are good examples of how a form predicated on dialogue paradoxically uses that form to emphasize how difficult or even impossible communication is. Yet, the paradox is even deeper because we understand what they saying, the meaning of their work is fairly clear, something is communicated.

Watching a young child who is in the process of learning how to speak- we might suppose that we learn to communicate orally by trying out different combinations of sounds and having people reinforce certain of those combinations in specific ways. The child says ba, often just for the pure pleasure of forcing lips and vocal chords to move and make noise, and the parent responds, "Bottle? Do you see your bottle?" So in some ways, misunderstanding is rooted in the our ability to understand. It is bedrock to it. Without those initial misunderstandings, misinterpretations of the child's vocalizations, the parent wouldn't make an emphasis that channels that sound towards specific words. I find the idea that misunderstanding might be required for eventual understanding to be glorious. But then, admittedly, I am perverse.

A short post on Virno

Some useful threads from Paolo Virno's Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation:

The potential dangerousness of the human animal is also what makes it possible to innovate.  The ability to imagine/create "that which can be different from the way it is" creates chances to danger and creativity. Truly radical evil has the same root as the good life. Institutions only protect us if they part of the same dangers they try to protect us from.

Contemporary political institutions function as a permanent state of exception. The multitude (the One of many) is the fundamental form of political existence. Virno proposes the ideas of the katechon (that which restrains and contains without destroying) as the institution that best adapts itself to the permanent state of exception.

He choose jokes as a model for creativity. Whoever coins a joke does something new. Every joke contains the norm and a fragment of the state of exception. He looks at Freud (jokes, dreams as source of information), Aristotle (phroneis, fallacies) and Wittgenstein (semisolid, semihard nature of rule that is the test and the rule) in depth.

He suggests the joke or the fallacy, which points to the rule/norm while breaking/changing/playing with it and points to the fact that whole meta structure of rules/norms, as a model for how political innovation might happen. The creative moment of the witty quip is also the same type of thinking that Virno wants for our politics. The creative political move can come up with a third way. To use his example of the exodus: not staying in slavery with Pharaoh, not rebelling against Pharaoh- but going out into the desert.

Explaining the political punching bag post

According to Dean, a stand-up routine is a series of loosely linked jokes on a central topic told with attitude. Each joke shares the same basic structure. There is a set up, which has a premise and a 1st story followed by a punch with a premise that shares a connector with the premise & 1st story of the the set up but that reinterprets it to tell a 2nd story that pokes holes in a target assumption. Jokes in routine often have tags that extend the work already done by the joke to get another bang for the buck or there may be transitions between jokes.

Following Dean's structure, I break down the first couple of minutes of Colbert's routine. This drains all the water out of the routine's swamp, but it allows us to take pictures alligators (with ticking clocks in their bellies), so we can build our bit/byte/bite of a routine.

Topic:  The bill introduced by Congressman Posey (Birther movement and its spawn)

Intro: The character of pundit allows for easier introduction of new routine as new bit of news. 

Joke

Punch premise: introducing a bill will increase rumors, and is a crappy/stupid thing to do

Set up premise: introducing a bill will quash rumors, and is an act of kindness

Set up: Bill’s bill was part of his plan to squash rumors that Obama was ineligible to be president

1st story: putting focus on something stops rumors

Target assumption: He was trying to help

Connector: focus on rumors

Reinterpretation: He didn’t help

2nd story: putting focus on something increases rumors

Punch: by getting those rumors into as many outlets as possible (this is a sarcastic punch- an obvious problem stated as if it is not a problem)

Tag: To quell rumors, demanding test to determine if FL congressmen are part alligator.

Joke

Set up: I’ve had enough with the reckless whispering

Punch: But the rumor is . . .

Joke

Set up: We’ve all been in the place of getting some hot gator love

Punch: Most of us remember to use protection

Segue: Bill couldn’t get a co-sponsor, interview with Posey