The Joke, the 'As If', and the Statement
Dr Edmond Wright
Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1976 [1905]), because of its subject-matter, has had a fragmented history. From within psychoanalysis itself it has been regarded as an early application of the insights of his dream theory to a by-way of human behaviour, in which the unconscious adopts techniques against the censor similar to those that are operative within the dream. In his essay 'Humour' (1985 [1927]) Freud himself did later add an addendum on humour per se which related it to his id-ego-superego topology, extending the context of relevance to the operations of the superego as an 'heir to the parental agency', but he did not widen the generality of his explanation further.
From within other disciplines his Joke theory took its place among older theories of humour. Psychologists have set it down as one of the 'Relief' theories, typified by that of Herbert Spencer, in which the arousal induced by some threat is allowed a convulsive escape in laughter when the stimulus proves incongruously false, allowing us to 'descend' from 'great to small', that is, from fear to safety (Spencer, 1860, 395). Anthropologists have connected his notion of a covert temporary relief from inhibition with practices of 'permitted disrespect' found in early societies; such practices tend to enter behaviour where there are ambivalences that create points of tension, as between generations or between kin bound by custom (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952). Linguists have noted how close Freud is to Incongruity theories, in which two rival 'scripts' are unexpectedly brought together by some ambiguous 'trigger', and single out his insistence that the more alien the two 'circles of ideas', the greater the pleasure the joke delivers (Attardo, 1994, 56; Freud, 1976 [1905], 168). This feature has also been of interest in cognitive theories about which Freud comments, using a quotation, that they are characterized by a stress on a movement from 'bewilderment to illumination' (ibid., 42). This detecting of a relation between humour and the applicability of concepts is a view traceable back to Schopenhauer who saw humour as attending the mismatches between concept and action:
It occurs just as often, however, that the incongruity between a single real object and the concept under which, from one point of view it has rightly been assumed, is suddenly felt. Now the more correct the subsumption of such objects under a concept may be from one point of view and the greater and more glaring their incongruity with it from another point of view, the greater is the ludicrous effect which is produced by this contrast, (Schopenhauer, 1883, II, 252)
A recent statement of such a cognitive theory, typical of several others, has been that of Jonathan Miller in which he takes Freud's as a 'Relief' theory and relates it to the humorous as being 'a sabbatical let-out that lets us redesign categories and concepts' (Miller, 1988, 12). Miller is noteworthy in his insistence that, in spite of our immediate prejudice against seeing humour as deserving of serious study, in joking 'we may be undertaking the most serious thing we do in our lives' (ibid., 13).[i]
Nowhere in the later developments of these theories, however, has there been a consideration of whether Freudian psychoanalysis might have a further input to the theory of humour beyond the connections noted above. There has been one conspicuous exception, that of Jerry Aline Flieger's discussion of the relation of Freud's comic theory to the postmodern text (Flieger, 1991), in which she demonstrates how psychoanalytic theory can help with the formulation of a 'postmodernism of resistance', a critique of high-rationalist theory that does not descend into relativism. She does not refer to cognitive theories, but the measure of overlap is marked. The present article endeavours to follow the lead she has given in extending the psychoanalytical perspective, while making reference to current investigations of humour that lie outside the psychoanalytical, those in sociology, linguistics and psycholinguistics, in which there has been much activity in the last few years. But the further aim is to show that psychoanalytical theory, when given a Lacanian interpretation, can prove cogent enough to place the cognitive theory itself in a wider epistemological frame.
I Freud's theory
One of the witticisms that Freud himself cites as example is the Italian 'Traduttore - Traditore!' ('To translate [is] to betray!'). He is using it to show how slight the alteration can be that produces the shift taking us from one from one context to another, and then he adds a comment on the 'similarity':
The similarity, amounting almost to identity, of the two words represents most impressively the necessity which forces a translator into crimes against his original. (Freud, 1976 [1905], 67)
This notion that the shift is associated with a 'crime' is unsurprising in the context because throughout the book Freud views the joke - when not indulged in as nonsensical play, the 'innocent' joke as he calls it - as an attempt to evade the censor, to enjoy a temporary challenge to authority, to collude with another in a momentary escape from internal and external repression. The very meaning of the Italian epigram is itself a comment on the Joke from Freud's point of view for it could be said that any Joker's 'translation' via some 'similarity' is intended 'to betray' some strict rule that he finds irksome. This is for Freud the 'tendentious' joke, where 'tendentious' means not merely with a hidden purpose, but distinctly biased, the colluding participants illicitly enjoying the breaking of a rule while being protected from criticism by the ambiguity on which the joke is trading. The 'scrutiny of criticism' is rendered ineffectual by it, so that the Joker and his/her Hearer can enjoy the pleasure of their brief rebellion in safety, immune from repercussions. Freud sees a strong parallel here with the defeat of the censor in dreams, and by using the same measures, condensation, displacement and indirect representation (i.e. by symbol or analogy). The result is an 'economy of psychic expenditure', the pain of repression now assuaged as unwanted energy required for repression escapes in the fits of laughter. Even the 'innocent' joke, which appears to rely solely upon the pleasure derived from the play of words, is not wholly non-tendentious in Freud's view, his reason being that there is a pleasure in escaping the rules of language itself: all jokes thus set themselves up 'against an inhibiting and restricting power' (ibid. 183).
Throughout his book Freud thus has tended to see the Joke as a safety-valve, offering an occasional relief from the repressive demands of internal and external authorities. At the very beginning he considered theories that suggested that the joke might involve a' playful judgement' characterized by a 'comic contrast', but regarded them as 'scarcely intelligible' because they considered jokes out of their real context. In his belief they fail in coherence, merely producing something corresponding to a series of anecdotes about the Joke rather than its full-length 'biography' (ibid., 45). As regards the claim of those cognitive theories which find 'sense in nonsense', he considers his own explanation as sufficient, in that it takes the 'sense' as providing the excuse that 'prevents the pleasure [in the play on words] being done away with by criticism' (ibid., 181). It is Jean-Paul, he believes, who came nearest to the core concern in seeing 'Joking as the disguised priest who weds every couple', and he approves of F. T. Vischer's addendum to this, which places jokes from the side of social disapproval : 'He likes best to wed couples their relatives frown upon' (ibid., 41; Vischer, 1846-57, I, 422). In the case of the Comic, which he considers in his last chapter, he says that we are amused by the unavailing performance of an external victim, who characteristically is expending too much effort in a situation where we think ourselves superior in knowledge and therefore in our economy, which gives us the illusion of being on the side of authority.
In the later paper on humour, which he sees as possessing 'a greater dignity' than jokes or the comic, Freud attributes it to the capacity of the ego to refuse to suffer, which amounts to a 'triumph of the Pleasure Principle against the unkindness of real circumstances' (1985 [1927], 429). The ego can do this by identifying with the father, so that he can see his sufferings in a wider context, shifting its cathexis onto the superego. Freud admits that it is unusual that the superego here foregoes its customary severity, but insists that, to the degree the ego can see itself as child consoled by amusement, so it is enabled to bear the frustrations of life. This is an overly stoical interpretation of humour, one that still sees it as a palliative to the inexorable pressure upon the unconscious.
Ironically, then, there is detectable throughout Freud's reflections on jokes and humour a strangely conservative tendency. The translation in a joke is inevitably an act of treachery that we are lucky to get away with, the authorities being as bemused by the ambiguity as the censor is by the tropings of the dream. It matches his strict opposition of the Pleasure Principle to the Reality Principle, as if notions of 'reality' could not be invested with desire, as if they were given obstacles that could only be accepted for what they were with the aid of the illusory play of the joke and the resigned shrug of humour. Flieger makes the comment that Freud is more concerned with the veiling that the joking process performs than any revelation that might come from it (Flieger, 1991, 59). Freud, indeed, regards reason as one of the enemies of the joking process: 'Reason, critical judgement, suppression - these are the forces against which [the joke] fights in succession' (1976 [1905], 189), where one can see the conservative bias at its plainest in the equation of the first two of his list with the third. A later Freudian, Edmund Bergler, is equally conservative, taking the satisfaction of laughter to reside in the temporary debunking of the feared superego: this is achieved through the creation of a substitute victim that betrays the psychic masochism that the ego itself suffers. However, the escape remains momentary, a kind of quick fix that soon returns the ego to its erstwhile subjection (Bergler, 1956, x-xii). Nevertheless, Freud is surely right in his stress upon there being an economizing of psychic expenditure, that in some way authority passes from the existing ethical and political authorities as a result of the transformation: what is not to be conceded is that authority must necessarily return to them, for the investigation of humour raises the whole question of what authority is, how it is constituted, and how it relates to the linguistic process by which we categorize our private sensory experience in a public manner.
II The linguists
The recent progress in the linguistic investigation
of humour has been remarkable, providing an increase in sophistication that
shows the linguists as not in the least prejudiced against the subject for its
supposed triviality.[ii] The most
prominent American theoretician, Victor Raskin, after giving a comprehensive
survey of the theories of humour, including Freud's, presents a strictly
linguistic theory, one confined solely to verbal humour. He in fact regards his
theory as compatible to the existing theories, which in his view achieve only a
partial success. He divides those theories into three groups: (1) Repression
theories, Freud's in particular; (2) Incongruity theories, which have a
cognitive-perceptual basis; and (3) Disparagement theories, which function as a
social-behavioural type of explanation (Raskin, 1985, 30). It is convenient here
to use his classification in order to fill in the background briefly about the
Incongruity and Disparagement theories.
Incongruity theory might be said to
have begun with Kant, for whom 'Laughter is an affection arising from a
strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing' (Kant, 1957
[1790], 199) He instances accounts of grief, which normally would arouse some
measure of concern in us, but when we hear the following story the seriousness
is banished and we 'laugh and enjoy' (at least those in the
eighteenth century for whom people in trade were still an courtly object of
fun):
A merchant was returning from India with all his wealth in merchandise. A great storm blew up in which the only hope for the vessel lay in casting all the cargo overboard. On seeing his whole wealth cast into the sea, the merchant's wig turned quite grey with grief (ibid., 200).
Kant does not analyse the link between the two incongruous fields as later theorists in this tradition were to do, D. H. Monro, for example, who noted that there had to be a 'hidden propriety' to effect a shift across the inappropriateness between the two contexts (Monro, 1951, 241). Jerry Suls, from psychology, insists that there has to be this 'resolution' of the incongruity for the humour to be present. He gives as proof the effect of certain substitutions in the following joke:
'Doctor, come at once! Our baby has swallowed (a) a fountain-pen (b) a rubber-band.'
'I'll come right over. What are you doing in the meantime?'
'(c) Using a pencil.' (d) 'We don't know what to do.'
(a) and (c) together produce the joke since they contain both the incongruity and the resolution. (b) and (c) produce an incongruity but no resolution. (a) and (d), (b) and (d) have no incongruity to be resolved (Suls, 1983, 45). Here (c) functions as the 'punchline', common to all jokes, the element that effects the transition from one context to the other. Here it changes the meaning of 'What are you doing in the meantime?' (the 'trigger' of the joke) from doing something to help the baby, a threatening interpretation, established in the context of the call to the doctor, to doing for a writing implement, which has harmless connotations, established by the phrase 'Using a pencil'.
All jokes have these five elements:
- the ambiguous trigger over which the interpretations play;
- a clue to a first context of interpretation;
- the first meaning resulting from this first clue;
- a clue to a second context of interpretation; and
- the second meaning resulting from this second clue.
The
punchline can be either the Second Clue or the Trigger. In the joke above it was
the Second Clue; in the following joke it is the Trigger: 'What did the
big telephone say to the little telephone?' - 'You're
too young to be engaged' (Ahlberg and Ahlberg, 1982, 27; my
italics).
Disparagement theories begin with Plato who in the
Philebus (48b-e) traces comedy to the clownishness of ignorance,
particularly the absence of self-knowledge. Hobbes saw the cause of laughter
either in some self-applauding act or in the perception of 'some deformed
thing in another' which enables one to triumph over him (Hobbes, 1962
[1651], 93). Alexander Bain saw laughter attending a sudden sense of
superiority, in particular when something that was dignified is reduced to a
ridiculous position (here noting the element of the incongruous), so that
laughter is most intense when we escape from a 'coerced solemnity'
(Bain, 1888, chs., x and xiv). This is similar to that of Henri Bergson, who saw
the ridiculous in anything mechanical or automatic in someone's behaviour
so that they are acting unthinkingly to their own disadvantage, with the sense
that we are superior in knowledge in thus escaping their fate (Bergson, 1956
[1900], 70-74).
One of those influenced by Raskin, Salvatore Attardo, sees
Freud as joining a Relief theory to an Incongruity one, and credits him with
careful analysis of types of jokes, though without producing a theory general
enough to account for the structure of verbal humour (Attardo, 1994, 53-56).
That generality Raskin and Attardo believe is to be obtained if the joke can be
analysed as being heard by speaker/hearers possessed of an idealized Chomskyean
competence, who are unaffected by race or gender bias, by obscenity, who are
never subject to boredom, and 'who have never heard it before'
(Attardo, 1994, 195-6). The aim in this 'General Theory of Verbal
Humour', Raskin and Attardo's update on Raskin's original
'Semantic Script Theory of Humour', is to screen out all that might
distort a scientific assessment of what constitutes a joke and what does not.
The incongruous fields are reduced to two 'scripts' that are
'opposite' and yet 'overlap'. A script is defined as an
organized set of information which the participants have internalized, a
semantic network which may be either generally known or private to a small
group. 'Oppositeness' is defined ostensively: Raskin lists three
classes of opposition: actual/non-actual, normal/abnormal, possible/impossible,
and specifies some particular examples - good/bad, life/death, obscene/not
obscene, money/no money, high status/low status - all of which, in
Raskin's words, are 'essential to human life', indeed, making
up in their totality of interconnections, 'our entire civilization'.
The competent speaker/hearers are required so that 'explanatory
adequacy' can be reached, 'based on the entities and relations which
are close to the ones which determine the speaker's performance'
(Raskin, 1985, 93-113). Communication varies between 'bona fide
' and 'non-bona fide ' conditions, the former being
governed by H. P. Grice's 'Co-operative Principle' (Grice,
1975) (statements that one can trust) and the latter being untrustworthy
('lying, play-acting, joke-telling'). It is of course admitted that
in ordinary language there is a constant to-ing-and-fro-ing between the two, but
it is taken for granted that the competent speaker can readily distinguish them;
they never combine.
The 'General Verbal Theory of Humour' is
thus an Incongruity theory dependent upon regarding language from the point of
view of la langue, the Saussurean idealized synchronic aspect of language
(that is, seeing it as a logically completed system, timeless [syn-chronic
] and unalterable, upon which all common understanding rests). Clearly it
appears to do what it claims to set out to do, namely, given the
'oppositeness' of scripts and given the 'overlap' or
'trigger' that permits the shift from the one to the other, all
verbal jokes can be analysed in this way and declared funny or not. The later
additions to the theory (Attardo, 1994, 221-26) endeavour to bring in pragmatic,
situational and narrativity considerations, in that all needful 'knowledge
resources' are in play, the target of the joke is clear, the clues, if
any, in the situation are plain, the narrative organization of the joke is well
performed, and the 'logical mechanism' of the trigger functions
adequately. With these caveats and with the premisses about competence and
'oppositeness' in place, it would seem that no verbal joke could
escape the scientific definition which Attardo says a linguist should be in
search of. If the objection is made that the funniness of the joke seems to be
unassessed, the answer is that that is dependent upon the degree of
'oppositeness' between the two scripts in any particular
case.
Several objections that spring to mind (for example, to say that to
leave assessment of funniness to an unexamined premiss is to leave out a key
feature of any joke) can be easily dismissed by the proponents of this theory by
pointing to their remit, which was to produce a verbal theory of humour
that would work given speaker/hearers of ideal competence. Anyone who complains
about the omission of pragmatic and situational elements will be referred to the
addenda to the theory that have just been mentioned. Their case seems watertight
as a theory operative upon la langue, language taken as a synchronic
logically complete whole, made up of the complex of 'scripts'
possessed by competent users of a language. If one produces a joke in which one
of the elements involved is nonsensical, then the answer will be that the
nonsensical element falls under a 'sense/nonsense' opposition. To
give an illustration: the psychologist B. F. Skinner asked his subjects to read
rapidly and repeatedly this nonsense sequence, 'bell-lie-mud-dum';
it was some time before they found that they were saying I'm a
dumb-bell (Skinner, 1957, 282). One can generalize jokes of this kind so
that the 'nonsensical' element is not even uttered by a human being:
some children were found laughing because the door to their classroom actually
made a noise when opened that sounded exactly like an odd voice saying
'Creak!' The response would no doubt be that this is not strictly a
verbal joke, but, though one can concede this to the linguists, it still
points up the fact that as a general theory of humour as such theirs is hardly
satisfactory. To hedge themselves inside la langue is to ignore the very
problem of the relation not only of la langue to la parole, but of
language to the world.
But there is a further objection which is not so
readily turned aside, concerning their reliance on the division of bona
fide from non-bona fide communication. As was mentioned above they
make appeal to Grice's 'Co-operative Principle' to underpin
this distinction. Grice argues that normal communication cannot take place
unless the participants to a dialogue operate upon certain assumptions that
define common purposes tacitly understood. He summed them up in four categories
or maxims (with some 'sub-maxims'). These were as follows:
- The Category of Quantity: 'Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange)' and possibly 'Do not make your contribution more informative than is required'.
- The Category of Quality: 'Try to make your contribution one that is true', with two more specific maxims: 'Do not say what you believe to be false' and 'Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.'
- The Category of Relation: 'Be relevant.' (Grice admits that 'foci of relevance' may be difficult to fix in any particular case).
- The Category of Manner: 'Be perspicuous', which includes as sub-maxims. (i) 'Avoid obscurity of expression'; (ii) 'Avoid ambiguity'; (iii) 'Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)'; (iv) 'Be orderly' (Grice, 1975, 67).
With these maxims being observed, the communication is guaranteed to be bona fide, and it is obvious that 'lying, play-acting and joke-telling' are ruled out, as is fiction in general. The sub-maxim alone 'Avoid ambiguity' prevents the trigger of the joke being used at all. If a psychoanalyst or literary theorist were to protest that unconscious elements of meaning cannot be ruled out, the answer would be that in the scientific analysis of communication we are not centrally concerned either with neurotic invasions of speech or with poetic or narrative elaborations of it - rather with what constitutes 'normal' utterance, which obviously, they believe, must be our main topic in the investigation of language. Attardo even produces a series of counter-maxims that allow a joke to be told: for the Quantity category - 'Give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke'; Quality - 'Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke'; Relation - 'Say only what is relevant to the joke'; and Manner - 'Tell the joke efficiently' (Attardo, 1994, 205). These then define the type of non-bona fide communication that enables a joke to be told. With a good joke and a good joke-teller indications in the context and 'co-text' help us to switch confidently from bona fide to non-bona fide.
III The Idealization of Reciprocity
None of this appears to be immediately questionable.
There is no doubt that normal communication could not proceed unless all parties
made Grice's assumptions. After all, when we here something we can hardly
believe, we often respond with 'You must be joking!' However, before
Grice produced his Co-operative Principle, three other analyses had been made of
the co-operation that goes on in communication, those of the linguist Sir Alan
Gardiner, the sociologist Alfred Schutz and the psycholinguist Ragnar
Rommetveit. Gardiner, whose importance Chomsky now
acknowledges,[iii] insisted that
'without a give-and-take between speech and language, linguistic theory is
an impossibility', a view that rules out an overly secure reliance on the
synchronic view of language (Gardiner, 1932, 174). His main contention about
communication, which also predates Grice's analysis of meaning (Grice,
1957) was that 'the thing meant by any utterance is whatever the speaker
has intended to be understood from it by the listener' (Gardiner, 82), but
he adds that the intention as conceived of by the speaker can never be identical
with how that intention is conceived by the hearer. Speaker and hearer
inevitably have different angles of intentional perspective and consider
different aspects of the situation relevant, but as long as a sufficient
evidence of an overlap in their understanding remains salient to them, the
'postulate' that they are referring to 'the same thing'
will serve. He even asks 'Was the thing seen by Mary really the same thing
that James had meant?' and regrets that he has resolutely 'to turn
his back on this metaphysical question' since he is concerned with the
'common-sense assumptions' that are being made by the speaker and
hearer (Gardiner, 80).
Alfred Schutz addressed the same question from the
sociologist's point of view, taking up the very notion of
assumption. He argues that, when something is taken for granted by two
people in communication, it is 'merely unquestioned until further notice,
sufficiently determined for the purpose actually in hand at the time' and
this is no guarantee that something on the periphery of attention, perhaps
noticed by one participant and not by another, emerged into common awareness. It
might even contradict the understanding of the other, and neither know since
nothing in their common practice at the time revealed it (Schutz, 1970,
61).[iv] This recalls the insistence
of the philosopher C. I. Lewis that 'common reality' is a social
achievement projected by agents each with differing subjective access to
the world (Lewis, 1956 [1929], 111). Lewis's view now finds support among
those philosophers, psychologists and neurophysiologists who argue for radically
private sense-experience (Lowe, 1981; Brown, 1987; Ramachandran and Smythies,
1995 ; Edelman, 1992; Gregory, 1993; Alroy, 1995; Wright, 1990, 1996), for if
sensing is wholly confined to the brain, all agents are achieving co-ordination
only through an indirect channel, and therefore cannot have any supposedly
'direct' contact with external 'objects'.
Schutz
refines his concept of the common understanding that makes up la langue
thus: that in order to effect it we act on an 'idealizing of
reciprocity', of 'a congruency of our system of relevances',
such that 'I take it for granted - and assume my fellowman does the
same - that if I change places with him so that his "here"
becomes mine, I shall be at the same distance from things and see them with the
same typicality that he actually does' (Schutz, 1962, I, 11-13). Michael
Mulkay, and Melvin Pollner to whom he refers, follow Schutz in stressing the
'unitary realm' of common presuppositions that constitutes the
everyday world: 'we take for granted that we are dealing with
objective phenomena which exist independently of our actions and discourse and
which are experienced in much the same way by other human beings' (Mulkay,
1988, 22-3; Pollner, 1987; my italics).
As I have myself pointed out
(Wright, 1985, 86), the phrase 'take for granted' is a slippery one:
it contains the phrase take for which we use when we accept an illusion
or a surrogate for the real thing, which implies that our 'granting'
is only pro tempore, and it needs stressing here that 'to
grant' is to allow, to permit, because we believe that there is
nothing in the agreement which could run against our desires or cause us
suffering. The rational agreement underpinning la langue, its timeless
logical idealization, is thus only a viable one that depends on a mutual
trust that cannot rule out actual differences of intention, of existing desires
that, not being at the conscious level of mutual identification, are therefore
unconscious.
The psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit complains of the 'Platonic cast of
modern linguistics' that treats meaning only from the point of view of
la langue. He remarks that experiments in concept attainment have shown
convincingly that people know more than they are able to put into words, which
bears out the claims of Gardiner and Schutz as regards subjective differences.
He asks, if their concepts therefore remain different however much they use
words to make them converge, how it can be that they communicate at all. The
answer is like the answer to a riddle: that, in order to achieve at least the
partial co-ordination of their words they have to act as if they have
achieved a perfect co-ordination (Rommetveit, 1978, 31). To go back to
Gardiner's own riddle about whether his John and Mary see 'the same
thing': the ability to construct a 'thing' together out of the
ever-changing continuum of the real lies for them in their very determination to
act as if one thing is in front of them, even though, as Lewis insists,
each sees his or her own 'thing'. This superimposition of
perspectives will not come apart until action with that part of the real shows
up a so-far-concealed difference. Any 'object', any
'self' is held in viable place as a mutual hypothesis that
remains always open to modification when the real reveals itself, either in
external change or in the emergence of subjective differences in desire. The
fact that we should be tempted to use the phrase 'to all intents and
purposes' in saying that 'there is one thing in front of John
and Mary' betrays the reliance of this 'as if' upon an
impossibility, since no one can list all the intents and purposes of those
involved in the mutual definition; it is only the 'taking for
granted' all over again. Those who take their lead from Jean
Piaget's 'genetic epistemology' come to the same conclusion,
that objects are constructed from the flux of experience and are only viable
'until further notice' (von Glasersfeld, 1985, 99; see also Furth,
1987, 162-71; Rescher, 1992, 187-90; Hooker, 1995, 310-41). The flux, the real,
over which the hoped-for co-ordinations move, remains stubbornly existent all
the time: what proves continually in need of repair is objectivity. Existence
and objectivity logically come apart.
A number of things now become clear.
First, that Grice's 'Co-operative Principle', on which the
American linguists rely, is no more than the Schutzian principle without the
latter's awareness that this very idealization is what creates la
langue, the 'normal' in the first place. Second, that
Raskin's use of the term bona fide betrays the fact
that 'normal' speech depends upon the blind faith of participants
that their differing perspectives converge on a putatively 'common'
referent. The truth is that there is a real continuum of reference but
there are no actual referents : the taking for granted that there are
discrete separable entities in the real is what enables us to maintain viable
holds on ever-changing portions of it. It is like turning the nonsense of
Skinner's 'bell-lie-mud-dum' into the sense of
'I'm a dumb-bell!' The bona fide versus non-bona
fide distinction is one within the Schutzian idealization: we
mutually rely on true/false, fact/fiction, serious/comic, sense/nonsense
distinctions in order to refine the Idealization of Reciprocity, to help us
co-ordinate our differing perspectives the more successfully, but all these fall
under the larger mutual hypothesis of the (impossible) convergence of our
individual 'referents', a greater and all-embracing bona
fide. It is indeed of the structure of the Joke: we each have a separate
referent from everyone else, but take it for a common one. Here
Lacan's epigram is apposite: 'riddle : it is through you that
I communicate' (Lacan, 1977a, 122). Every statement thus hopefully moves
from an illusory superimposition of Speaker's and Hearer's
understandings to a new adjustment of them, in which the Hearer's moves
closer to that of the Speaker's. The Hearer is hopefully disabused of a
misalignment on the real and shifted to a better one, a kind of Freudian game of
'Fort-Da', where the child lost its cotton-reel/mother/concept only
to regain it/her. The Hearer's desire is disengaged from one
conceptualizing of that portion of the real - always to some degree a
disturbing experience - and then reassured that the new conceptualizing
serves her desire better. Her language suffers a change from its supposed
synchronic state in moving diachronically to a new one: the traduzione
('translation') is felt as a tradimento
('treachery') since the Speaker disobeyed the rules agreed so
far - to use Freud's own words again, 'forced into crimes
against the original' (Freud, 1976 [1905], 67). As with the Cretan Liar,
truth becomes a lie becomes a truth, changing the Cretan language, our language
- incessantly. This is what the Joke enacts, so Statement, Joke, Metaphor,
Metonymy, Tragic Irony, Story, all evidence the Joke's pattern of
conceptual shift upon the real.
So those researchers into humour, from
Schopenhauer onwards, who saw the Joke as intimately connected with the
transformation of concepts were justified. The Polish linguist Bohdan Dziemidok
(1993), whose own theory of a 'deviation from a norm' falls under
the same criticism levelled against those of Raskin and Attardo, mentions the
theory of Zofia Lissa (1938), who argues that something appears comic when there
is a change of concepts upon 'the objective phenomena', one that
moves the hearer from the fearful to the harmless; she also adds that a
transformation in the opposite direction can have the same structure. Many of
the researchers into humour have made the mistake of considering it as a
linguistic feature distinct from all others, that it could have no relation, for
example, to tragedy. But 'the comic is composed of just such elements ...
as are found in many a tragic situation' (Sedgewick, 1967, 26). Lacan
asserts the same connection (Lacan,
1958).[v] Attardo does note that the
pattern of humorous stories bears a relation to that of the Joke (Attardo,
254-70); what he does not go on to argue but could have done was that all
stories, including tragic ones, have the same pattern.
In Kant's
example of a joke, the shift from a threatening interpretation (real human grief
causing someone's hair to turn white) is transferred (via the likeness of
real hair to a wig on someone's head) into a comically nonsensical
interpretation (the merchant's wig turning grey). This provides the relief
that emerges in laughter, with the further subtlety that the merchant's
'grief' would be as inappropriate in the moral field as the nonsense
is in the logical. In the following interchange in King Lear, precisely
the same transfer goes on between two scripts by means of a trigger. In this
scene the mad Lear is imagining himself as a judge holding a trial with his
daughters as the accused, the 'daughters' being two wooden stools in
the hut where they are sheltering from the storm:
FOOL: Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril?
LEAR: She cannot deny it.
FOOL: Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool.
LEAR: And here's another, whose warpt looks proclaim What store her heart is made on.
There is more than one ambiguity here, but we will
examine only the word 'warpt'. Lear is using the word
'warpt' metaphorically of 'Regan's' face to
express the distortion of her evil, in particular her filial ingratitude, but in
this circumstance it literally applies to the second stool (that is standing for
Regan), which no doubt has warped legs. Lear has made the stool into a visible
metaphor. Though we may be tempted towards amusement, the context is such that
the shift on the 'trigger' warpt refuses to leave the
'threatening' script of Lear's tragic predicament for the
harmless 'stool' one; the result instead is that the power of the
tragedy is increased. Yet the interchange has exactly the same five structural
elements as Suls' joke example (the baby swallowing the fountain-pen),
namely, the trigger, the two clues, the two resultant meanings.
The
Incongruity theories had thus grasped one essential about the Joke, that there
has to be an affective distance between the two 'languages',
because one is adaptive, the other not. The Disparagement theories had grasped
the fact that the Speaker successful in communication is putatively superior in
his ability to improve another's concept; Bergson was right to the degree
that he saw that whoever is operating with a maladaptive concept is defeating
him- or herself, and will appear therefore not to be behaving with conscious
purpose but like a machine. But it is a cognitive theory that best explains the
Joke because the structure of each joke matches that of all cognitive advance.
Such advance can obviously occur with a single mind: someone can burst out with
laughter at the joy of a new discovery, as its riddle finds its punchline. In
the same way there can be anguish at the tragic realization, the
anagnorisis : the handkerchief that proved Desdemona's
faithlessness becomes the proof of her loyalty when Emilia's
'punchline' is uttered, the 'second clue' that gives her
the right to call Othello 'fool'. What bears out the psychoanalytic
insight is that affect always attends the transformation of concept, or the
resistance to it.
IV Lacan
There is a special difficulty in admitting to the
Idealization of Reciprocity, to accepting that the way we understand any concept
in the language might not be the same as another's. Because of the
Rommetveitian principle, that, in order to get a partial understanding,
we have to behave to each other as if we have already reached a perfect
one, how insidiously easy it is to imagine that the common agreement enshrines
our own perspective, that our personal 'referent', so far always
apparently confirmed in communication with our fellows, is exactly the same as
everyone else's. Those nearest to the established order of any society
will claim that any deviance from 'law', 'rule', or
'word-meaning' can only be a subjective distortion, a
'self-deception': mutatis mutandis, those at the periphery of
power will accuse the central authorities of 'pretence' and
'hypocrisy'. The favoured interpretation, whether on the right or on
the left, will accrue to itself an aura of 'objectivity',
'authority', 'normality', when those are precisely what
the 'as if' maintains only because it allows incessant
adaptation of the existing concepts from all
quarters.[vi] What will prove comic is
when the agent endeavours to hold to the maladaptive, self-defeating
interpretation in defiance of the clearest clues to a second, as when Emma in
Jane Austen's novel takes all the clues to Mr. Elton being in love with
her as being evidence of his being in love with Harriet: what will prove tragic
is when the shift to a new interpretation produces suffering in the outcome, as
when Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations resolutely takes all the
clues that his benefactor is a criminal as mere oddities typical of the legal
milieu in which Mr. Jagger moves.
Lacan sees as narcissistic any such
private appropriation of the Symbolic (the first of his three
'orders', his term for both la langue and all other symbolic
systems upon which our subjectivity depends), and both Emma and Pip are
unmistakably narcissistic. Lacan would say that they were governed by the
'Imaginary', the second of his 'orders'. Rather than
accept the risk that the use of the Symbolic involves, Emma and Pip were tempted
to project their own self-flattering interpretations as the 'norm',
so impressed by their own 'scripts' they remained unable to perceive
a shift when another, entirely new script became dominant. Lacan warns against
such narcissistic rigidifying of the Symbolic, calling it a 'formal
stagnation':
Now this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge: that which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity and substantiality, in short, with entities or "things" that are very different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in the shifting field. stretched in accordance with the lines of animal desire. (Lacan, 1977a, 17)
This is the same
warning as Mulkay's, who warns of 'the serious mode being used to
control and dominate' even though it is not 'a neutral medium for
making sense of the world' (Mulkay, 1988, 220). And among those who do so
control and dominate there are some who, as Sloterdijk has detailed, are able to
manipulate the social drama cynically, well aware of the mismatch between their
apparent 'authority' and its performance (Sloterdijk, 1988).
In
his Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' (Lacan, 1976), Lacan
uses Poe's story as a model for the transfer of the authority of the
meaning of the Symbolic. The character in the story who imagines that s/he is in
the position of Hobbesian 'superiority', in control of the symbol,
in possession of the Phallus, is subverted by another whose perspective
transforms its meaning. The trigger was significantly a letter that, because of
its situation, could be taken to be either something negligible or something of
high importance. For example, the Minister is able to exchange a substitute
letter for the Queen's own embarrassing one in full view of her while she
is unable to do anything about it. The minister in turn, who hid the
Queen's letter in full view in his letter-rack, has the same trick played
on him, for the detective Dupin manages to distract his attention sufficiently
to exchange his own substitute for the Queen's. In each case someone who
considered themselves to be invulnerable proves helpless in an ambiguous
situation . Flieger identifies the comic pattern in each exchange: someone who
imagined themselves secure was by that very complacency exposed to subversion;
they become the butt of the joke when the authority they thought they possessed
is stolen through a transformation of what had been supposedly objectified
(Flieger, 1991, 111-13). The whole becomes an allegory of what happens to the
metaphorical 'letter', the Symbolic, in that it remains open to
subversion from the trickster who can perceive a closer relation of the symbol
to the Real, the third of Lacan's 'orders'. But that is what
all speakers who manage to communicate their adjustment of another's
concept are able to do.
Although Lacan himself did not do so, his Real can
be linked with the Continuum of Reference that has emerged in the
epistemological enquiry above, distinct from the 'things' and
'selves' which our mutual hypotheses endeavour to render secure. His
Real 'laughably casts down throws of its dice' which can upset the
most embedded of Imaginary identifications, emerging in puns, errors and
'misapprehensions' (Lacan, 1988, 220; 1977a, 122). His declaration
that 'the paths of truth are in essence the paths of error' (Lacan,
1988, 263) would be rejected as postmodern paradox by those mired in the
'formal stagnation', but it makes sense when the structure of the
Statement is made clear. Speakers and Hearers cleave to the 'Laws of
Thought' ('X is X '; X is either B
or not-B '; 'X is not not-X ') in
order to hold the Idealization of Reciprocity in place, but if those laws
applied from the beginning to the end of the uttered Statement no concept could
ever be adjusted, with words frozen to an impossible single meaning in a
timeless inanition.
To illustrate: a statement in an actual situation might
go 'Those trees have been cut down' - this really amounts to
the Speaker saying 'You know those trees that we have just been talking
about and that we both know about in exactly the same way' and Hearer
replying 'Yes' - 'Well,' says the Speaker,
'we don't know about them in the same way, for they have been cut
down.' Take the Hearer to be miserable because the trees were
Lawson's Cypresses that have been blocking out the light in her house for
years, and her concept of the trees moves, as in a joke, from being invested
with misery to joy. In psychoanalytic terms, the pain of castration that attends
upon the laws of the Symbolic will have been to a degree eased, as two subjects
bring their desires and expectations closer into line. But for that
communication to have been made, Speaker and Hearer did have to entertain in a
fictive manner the hypothesis that there was one set of trees that was
identical for both of them. It was fictive because, although they knew
that there was hopefully a sufficient overlap in their understandings to get a
mutual grip on that portion of the Real the trees, they did not coincide
perfectly in those understandings. This 'sliding-away'
(glissement ) from that performed security of reference 'conceals
what is the true secret of the ludic, namely the most radical diversity
constituted by repetition in itself' (Lacan, 1977b, 61).
So there is
a sense in which the struggle between Freud's Reality Principle and
Pleasure Principle informs every joke, every statement, every story, but not in
the sense he took it - and here I, as Speaker, am endeavouring to adjust
your conceptualization of these two principles. 'Reality', if taken
to be the objectivities such as received opinion presents them, as la
langue has declared, is now seen to be no more than the structure that the
Idealization of Reciprocity has constructed for us and history has delivered to
date. To take that 'reality' to be a given obstacle against which
'pleasure' must vainly struggle is to remain within the
Idealization, dealing as it does with hypothesized distinctions of
'fact'/'fiction',
'sense'/'nonsense',
'rational'/'irrational', 'objective'/
subjective' in order to keep the as if in place. But this
'reality' is a fictively maintained selection from the undoubted
Real; it has to be so fictively maintained so that speakers and hearers can go
on adjusting the selections the better to serve us all, and that includes those
selections that have constructed ourselves. But the phrase 'the better to
serve us all' is a reminder that the constructions are made to promote and
preserve the lives of those communicating, to avoid their suffering and to
fulfill and to redirect their desires. The 'Pleasure Principle' is
at once the motivation of the whole Symbolic edifice and the cause of its
continual adjustment. Jouissance, as Lacan would call it, is not to be
viewed as in opposition to the 'Reality Principle', but as the drive
behind the fictions of logical co-ordination that are supposed to serve it. What
has been called cool objectivity, impartial logic, derives its calmness from the
fact that desires are there running in apparent agreement, that fictive
agreement necessary as the first step in every statement, its logical subject.
However, that agreement is deceptive and fortunately so: otherwise no one would
have cause to speak, since to speak is to subvert that agreement by producing
the logical predicate that corrects the alignment of word to world, Symbolic to
Real. Authority does not stay with a reigning censor but passes like a baton to
the trickster who may be able to justify its new possession by his or her
transformation of the concept. It is the old concept that is then proved to be
'tendentious', to be an antiquated rule that needed to evolve. In
humour the ego can identify with the father, not as in a consolation as Freud
thought, but as a maker of law in its own right, overcoming not bearing the
frustration it feels. To go back to the remark of Jean-Paul's that he
quoted, the 'relatives' come to smile upon the
'marriage' that they frowned upon. Jouissance is allowed its
'triumph' because the 'real circumstances' cease to be
'unkind'. The 'economy of psychic expenditure' can be,
not merely a brief escape for the repressed individual, but an economy
beneficial to everyone in the community.
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[i] Witness Stephen Leacock as
expressing this prejudice: 'People who sit down to write books on humour are
scientific people, philosophical analysers who feel that they must make
something serious, something real out of it, and show us that humour can, in
proper hands, be made as dull and respectable as philology or epistemology'
(Leacock, 1937, 15).
[ii] The
University Library at Cambridge recently refused to take the leading linguistic
journal on humour (Humor ) on the grounds that it was not of sufficient
academic interest.
[iii] Personal
communication.
[iv] Gardiner
makes the same point that actual contradictions may be concealed in the
interchange between speaker and hearer (Gardiner, 1932, 80). The sociologist
Aaron V. Cicourel points to the 'open horizon of unexplored content' that exists
between Speaker and Hearer, and argues that the communication can only function
on what he calls the 'Et Cetera Principle', which states that the Speaker
assumes that the Hearer will fill in for him- or herself the unstated but
intended meanings, which obviously allows for unnoticed slippage between the two
understandings (Cicourel, 1971,
148).
[v] Gutwirth quotes Helen
Bacon as making the same claim: 'Both comedy and tragedy center around man's
relation to error. The unacknowledged error is the cause of misplaced
complacency which is comic; the acknowledgement of error, with its shattering of
complacence and illusion, is in essence a recognition scene, which is the heart
of tragedy' ( Bacon, 1959, 430; Gutwirth, 1993,
183).
[vi] Wittgenstein's
protests about a 'private language' (Wittgenstein, 1967 [1953], 92e-94e) have
been thought by the conservatively minded to contribute to a healthy rejection
of relativism. What he did not recognize was that, while there cannot be a
private language, there can certainly be a private understanding of a
word in a public language which might be a better understanding than that
enshrined in the received opinion. He did consider reform of a language
possible, but never explained how it could come about (ibid., 51e).