The Laughter Virus

"Did you interview a young man named Terrence Weld in this connection?"

"Young 'Genial'? Yes I interviewed that specimen."

"He was genial?"

"Impeccably so. I considered him directly responsible for Harrison's death. When I told him so he said

"'What and me so young?'

"Exactly. And then he laughed."

"Interesting sound."

"Very."

"You recorded it?"

"Of course."

"Rather stupid on his part wouldn't you say so?"

"Not stupid exactly. He simply doesn't think the way we do. Perhaps he can't help laughing like that even when ti would seem to be very much to his disadvantage to do so."

"I would suggest that 'Genial' is that laugh...only existence 'Genial' has."

"Infectious laughter what? Yes he's a disease..a virus . There have been other cases. We try to keep it out of the papers." 

--  William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded

“Ha-ha,” he said.

I have picked texts where laughter jars the reader repeatedly. To legitimize my project to others I have to pick laughs that repeat themselves, that recur with such frequency and obvious oddness that it is easy to argue that the author or film-maker (the generator of the laugh) was deliberately using laughter as a device, to do something.

However, we need to recognize that “throwaway” laughs are of incident also. In fact, by way of their very superfluity and fugitivity they more perfectly crystallize what I believe to be the true nature of laughter. These laughs surface in a text without the author’s permission and are precisely more interesting because of this stowaway quality. They are isolated because they are singular, anomalous because they are of a different (a-structural) order to the text, they don't "do" anything because they refuse the tyranny of utility which demands that everything become a means to an end.

When you read these laughs in a book or watch these laughs in a film, you are jolted from the narrative, returned abruptly to the outside of representation.

“Ha-ha,” he said.

The laugh is a glitch that interrupts and makes visible various generic parameters of the text – the expectation that the plot will move forward and resolve, that the characters are self-contained individuals embedded in a social milieu, and, more basically, that internal and external reality can be represented with letters arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters.

The laughter glitch may appear only one time in a whole novel. But across literature and film, that same glitch recurs with a frequency that is itself comic (or horrific, depending on your temperament). These laughs are swept away with a fearful denial we recognize from every horror film:  it only happened that one time, maybe it won’t happen again.

But it has already happened again, it happens everywhere. The barely concealed panic that underlies these denials stems from the fear that the generic borders of the novel, the individual, time itself as a progressive narrative, are coming apart. The laughter glitch is ignored not because it is a one-off but because it’s very fugitivity and particularity indexes the breakdown, the coming undone, of structures of meaning and feeling. Or worse (or better, depending on your temperament) the laughter glitch is the little boy who shouts “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” 

And we all know what happens to the teenage girl who ignores the scraping at the window it's only a branch it won't happen again.

Whether this laughter is revolutionary (as Benjamin would have it) or barbaric (as no-fun-Adorno repeatedly insists) is what I want to investigate.

I am a collector of laughs.

When is Natalie Portman's Laugh Not Natalie Portman's Laugh?

See my piece on Natalie Portman in The Atlantic here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/laughter-without-humor-on-the-laugh-loop-gif/277853/

THE THREAT OF CYBER-LAUGHTER

Look what I found on the internet! I don't agree with myself any longer, but for the sake of archival completeness, here lies past-me.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/mcdonaldvhpaper.pdf

AT THE END OF THE POSSIBLE

AT THE END OF THE POSSIBLE

there is absurdist comedy and there is supernatural horror.

LAUGHTER p r o p e l s them both. 

LAUGHTER is the active philosophical force that r i c o c h e t s between terror and joy, the possible and impossible, the human and the alien.

HOW DO YOU CURATE OOO

So this morning I woke up and read Bataille for three hours, which is the maximum amount of time I can read Bataille before my brain starts to soften into secret, occult shapes. The moment I begin calculating how many bottles of Cava I would need to ensure my night ends in intoxicated human sacrifice is around about the time I take my lunch break. Today, my lunch wander took me to The Nottingham Contemporary, which is currently showing a free exhibition called The Universal Addressibility of Dumb Things, curated by artist Mark Leckey.

Leckey's collection spans three rooms. Each room has a general ontological theme: machine, animal, monster. The philosophical bent behind Leckey's show is deeply indebted to the field of OOO, which asks that we think about objects not as inanimate things for-us, but as beings with their own private lives. After visiting the show, the question that I am left with is this: is it possible to curate objects as objects, or can they only be curated as human art? As I moved through Leckey's three rooms, I saw the curation technique become more experimental and the curator less present.

The first room contains a panel by Leckey that describes what the show is about. The art-objects are spread around in the usual way, placed evenly around the walls and floor of the room. The patrons seem to know where to stand, how to move around the space.  A couple accidentally step into a grey circle painted on the floor around two car engines that have been encrusted in sickly blue paint and a bespectacled gallery worker hurries toward them, miming as she is polite-half-running that they step back. They do, instantly, full of stage-whispered apologies. DO NOT TOUCH THE ART. A middle-aged man stands with his hands clasped behind his back, gently rocking on his heels as he appraises four tires that have been arranged standing on the floor with a thick gallery-issued rope staking out their artistic coordinates and preventing him from getting closer, from smelling the rubber or licking the gleaming hub-caps. THIS IS ART. The man watching the tires is a painting of a man-looking-at-art. OBSERVING SYSTEMS.

In the little booklet that waits for you upon your entrance into the show there is an interview with Leckey typed in something that looks like Times New Roman.  Everyone is holding their booklets open with one hand between fore- and little finger. Leckey says that the show was inspired by Norbert Wiener and his famous book about cybernetics, which refuses ontological distinctiveness and says that everything works together as an interlocking system. For Wiener, a man using a gun is not two discrete beings (the human subject and inanimate object) but a single system. The man is becoming-gun. Leckey is interested in these weird, ontology-exploding hybrids that span artistic mediums and historical eras, and the show is full of them - a mandrake root carved into a human figure, medieval paintings of centaurs, fictional robots and limb prostheses.

Kicking off the show with the machine-room and cybernetics is telling, as Leckey repeatedly stresses the role of technology in producing these ontologically disruptive hybrids. "Objects communicate with us. We live in a world of talking fridges and websites that uncannily anticipate our desires," says the Dierctor of the Nottingham Contemporary. Well, yes. However, where the show became more interesting for me was in the moments where instead of showing technology as producing hybrids and animating objects, Leckey implied that technology only helps to make visible the existing animated lives of these objects. Showing us objects animated by technology implies that animated object-being is a new advance brought about by scientific progress and human rationality. This is misleading. As Leckey's exhibit advances, Science stops working and mysticism takes over: objects are not newly animated through new advances in science, grotesque Frankenstein's monsters, but were always animated, living secret lives of their own.

The second room is sort of loosely grouped around Nature and animals. There is a gigantic inflatable Felix the cat, a vagina with a man's foot bursting forth from it, a freestanding cardboard cutout of a Max Ernst elephant.  The picture at the top of this post is from this room. Leckey, instead of spacing objects around the room to emphasize their individual value as a piece of art on display, arranges them as a chunky clunky collage - they are cut and paste surrealist art pieces made material. The middle aged man-appraising-art walks up to the first tableau and visibly panics. He tries rocking back on his heels again, but he doesn't know whether to look at the whole thing (as a system, becoming-collage), or as a set of individual objects arranged in a single display case without a display case. If it is the first one, then he has to start thinking about the wall as a large painting. If it is the latter, it was probably best to think about this room not as a gallery but as a museum.

And what was to be made of the three heads that punctuated the top row of the collection - a medieval gargoyle, William Blake's death-mask with electrodes hanging from it, a decapitated cyberman mask from the cult classic Doctor Who. Am I, thinks the middle-aged man (who incidentally looks rather like an anthropology professor), supposed to consider these three objects as equivalent?  Do I buy the cyberman mask and display it in my home next to my medieval trinkets? Leckey has clearly read his Latour and his Harman; in the opening panel he refers to his project as a "Parliament" of things, and you can buy Toward Speculative Realism in the gallery gift shop, as if it were a book of Monet postcards. It was in this moment observing the anthropology professor observing the gargoyle/death-mask/cyberman triptych that I felt Harman and OOO in the room. The objects sit on their podiums, side by symmetrical side, and look at you as you walk in. How do I think about the gargoyle? Do I think about it as an object redolent with human history, as part of a disappeared building in a disappeared cityscape, as a symbol of medieval religious conviction, as an ontologically hybridized face - man/monster/demon? Who should I ask? Does the gallery worker know? Maybe Leckey says somewhere what his intentions were in putting these faces side by side... I should check my tiny booklet.

Where is the art here? Asking this question gets us to another, more pressing one: where is the object? Because Leckey is a Turner-prize winning artist, we expect his curation to hold some kind of artistic content as a whole.  By refusing to artistically annotate the objects, Leckey leaves the patron to discern art somewhere between the objects. His Turner-prize-winning-stamp must shine through in the juxtaposition and relation of objects. Like a collage or surrealist cut-up, it is in the spaces between objects that human meaning or beauty or truth or magic occurs. Of course, OOO (and I) would resist this idea, the over-emphasis on relation works to obscure the object. If we look only for relation then we don't see the gargoyle and the death-mask and the cyberman, we just see the gargoyle/death-mask/cyberman.  When we walk home we talk about the /// not the OOO.

It is naive (stupid) to think that Leckey has just left things there without ordering and organizing them. Harman would say that yes, Leckey's discourse is there, and yes - the anthropology professor's discourse is there too, and mine, and the couple's too. But it is naive (stupid?) again to think that just because these discourses are circulating, that the objects don't have a discourse of their own. They press up against each other, they have their own secret interactions, they are looking at you, too. And it is not a conversation or a relationship that we can understand. It's not Toy Story, where as soon as we leave the room the gargoyle jumps off his podium and soft shoe dances with the pottery vagina. And Leckey's show, although obsessed with networks and systems and relations, provides a space in which, for a moment, the object looks back at you with a disconcertingly solid unintelligibility.  In this space, the gallery as an institutional space utterly breaks down - imagine if Duchamp hadn't sent in a urinal but just told a patron in passing that the light fixture was a piece of art, or the dust-mote in the corner, or the subtle hair-clip in that lady's do. Thinking about things as art is practice for thinking about things as objects.

The final room is under the blacklight, it is a dark Bataillain dream of monsters and headless stick figures and a sacked shape jumping up and down over and over again on HD. The anthropology professor isn't here. Weird voices call from soft, dark corners and a minotaur creeps along the back wall. There isn't a gallery worker in here. I feel like I may as well not be in here. The objects, they ignore me. Perhaps half an hour earlier I would have thought they danced for me.  And I am reminded of a piece in Bataille which is terrifying and surreal and is about the dark dispossession of the self, the requirement that one hurls oneself into an abyss that at the last minute will folds outward as a passage into everything:

"I have often thought of the day when the birth of a man who would have his eyes very genuinely on the inside would at last be consecrated.  His life would be like a long tunnel of phosphorescent furs and he would only have to stretch out in order to plunge into everything which he has in common with the rest of the world and which is atrociously incommunicable to us."

NURSE RATCHED'S SMILE

"The Smiler" - a new rollercoaster at British theme park Alton Towers - is scheduled to open in 3 days. The advert, shown above, opens with a lone man strapped into his roller-coaster car with wide glittering eyes and an even wider glittering smile. As the cars around him begin to fill up, he turns to the boy strapped next to him, his head snaking from side to side, and says in a deep and booming (read: a B-movie-villain) voice: "JOIN US."

Behind the Rider's glassy, threatening smile lie a host of other smiles: the sliced psychosis of The Joker's smile, the glittering sway of the Cheshire Cat's grin (an allusion made stronger by the shitty use of CGI in both the advert and, less forgivably, Burton's recent Alice in Wonderland), the allusion to a Vincent Price-esque hammer horror madness.

Above all, what is happening here is that the smile is being used as a threat. Roller-coasters make bank by promising a kind of institutionally regulated violence.  If the advertisers are doing their job correctly, they elicit your total fear whilst promising you via an officious whisper in the ear a total care. I suppose Baudrillard and all those would want to talk about the roller-coaster as simulated hyperreality. I'm more interested in why they chose a SMILE to represent this nexus of fear and care.

The ride begins, and the boy is transformed.  First, his eyes are infected and inflected with light in images that are weirdly reminiscent of the trippy SF classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Then, his mouth begins to open in a shout of fear or an exultant sounding of joy or a life-affirming evacuation of breath or a suicidal intake of purple-tinted air that circulates his car.  That we cannot tell the difference between a shout and a laugh, between fear and joy, is precisely where laughter gains its philosophically useful coordinates: it is an affective jumble that comes to represent a thousand affective stances or postures that have been marginalized in the current Affect Studies attentiveness to weeping and melancholia.  Laughter rises up to fill in the gaps during moments on the brink - of life, language, selfhood. This is not to say that it cognitively occupies these gaps to provide a master-narrative of identity. Instead, it positively and materially squeezes in between philosophical spaces to show the meatiness of experience without cognizant coordinates.

The laugh, however, almost immediately is transformed into a smile.  The smile grows wider on the boy's face, and for a moment we see a gigantic TV screen wrapped around a pillar with just the boy's decapitated grinning head, eyes vacant and staring, occupying every pixel.  This too is reminiscent of SF movies, of the dystopian future society of total surveillance and affective conformity utterly oversaturated by replicated smiles of happy  consumers (Bladerunner, Minority Report) or calm decapitated heads reporting and regulating the masses (Equilibrium, 1984).

The transformation of the ontologically disruptive LAUGH with the gaping reproducible SMILE, I argue, is the difference between a liberating lapse of power and control in a joyful affective surge; and a return of power on the individual in a smile that is fixed, inert, dead. The laugh is forced down into the belly and plastered over with a rigid smile. The smile is historically associated with regulatory social etiquette ("don't show your teeth, dear, it's common"); and finds its most perfect form in the regulatory apparatus of the insitution in what I call the "institutional smile."

Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is a perfect example of the cold, institutional smile which barely conceals an almost pathological will to violence.  Ratched's smile embodies the nexus of fear and care that adverts for "The Smiler" is tapping into. Kesey describes her smile over and over again in the novel as neat, painted, stretched, solid, settled. My favorite description goes like this:

"[The Big Nurse] walks around with that same doll smile crimped between her chin and her nose and that same calm whir coming from her eyes, but down inside of her she's tense as steel."

To harness your laughter into a gaping smile is to commit yourself, to the simulated death event of a roller-coaster ride, to the policed borders of an institution, to a set of behaviors sanctioned by a glittering, terrifying, grinning system.

Forget the trope of mad laughter, it was always the smile that was pathological.

IT IS LAUGHTER THAT IS ALIEN

I used to think that the jarring, unsettling laughter of robots in SF movies served as proof of their non-human origins, an affective
Turing Test that helped the reader sift out the (implicitly lesser) non-humans from the privileged human. So, when Haley Joel Osmond bursts into rapid-fire mechanical laughter in AI, or Evil Robot Maria contorts her face into a maniacal mask as she burns to death in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, it was a relief for the viewer, proof that despite their physical approximation to the human, these beings had been mechanical and manufactured all along.

I've spent the last few years collecting laughter-moments, bizarre or out-of-place laughs in film, literature, court transcripts, television, music recordings. What these moments show me, repeatedly, over and over, is not that laughter is the exceptional affective right of the human ("we are the animal that laughs") that helps to police and reinforce the ontological boundary between human and non-human, subject and object.
What these moments of weird laughter have shown me, whether they be broken and rigid ha-ha-ha's or loose-limbed lyrical wails of laughter, is that laughter itself is non-human.

It is not that the alien cannot laugh. Rather, it is laughter that is alien. 

Like the narrator of Handmaid's Tale in the quoted section below, laughter overruns us, it breaks down our ability to think, know, or be. We are transformed, momentarily, into a shaking and quaking object - an object among objects. We are thrust into a different philosophical spectrum, in which ordinary ontology is split open, as wide open as our choking gasping laughing mouths. What we do from there, what that enables us to do, is what I have to figure out.

OUT OF THE BROKEN PLACE

“I stand up, in the dark, start to unbutton.  Then I hear something, inside my body. I’ve broken, something has cracked, that must be it.  Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in my face.  Without warning: I wasn’t thinking about here or there or anything.  If I let the noise get out into the air it will be laughter, too loud, too much of it, someone is bound to hear, and then there will be hurrying footsteps and commands and who knows? Judgment: emotion inappropriate to the occasion.  The wandering womb, they used to think.  Hysteria.  And then a needle, a pill. It could be fatal.

I cram both hands over my mouth as if I’m about to be sick, drop on my knees, the laughter boiling like lava in my throat.  I crawl into the cupboard, draw up my knees, I’ll choke on it.  My ribs hurt with holding back, I shake, I heave, seismic, volcanic, I’ll burst.  Red all over the cupboard, mirth rhymes with birth, oh to die of laughter.

I stifle it in the folds of the hanging cloak, clench my eyes, from which tears are squeezing.  Try to compose myself.

After a while it passes, like an epileptic fit.  Here I am in the closet. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I can’t see it in the dark but I trace the tiny scratched writing with the ends of my fingers, as if it’s a code in Braille.  It sounds in my head now less like a prayer, more like a command, but to do what? Useless to me in any case, an ancient hieroglyph to which the key’s been lost.  Why did she write it, why did she bother? There’s no way out of here.

I lie on the floor, breathing too fast, then slower, evening out my breathing, as in the exercises, for giving birth. All I can hear now is the sound of my own heart, opening and closing, opening and closing, opening."

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

BUMPY LAUGHTER

This project began by collecting moments of laughter that were utterly disassociated from humor. I became obsessed with laughs that simply burst forth out of a mouth, weird laughs that were not reactions or responses to comedy or humor.  These oddities called attention to themselves by standing to one side of humor, and also to one side of the material text itself. Interrogating why these particular laughs jammed the narrative was the intellectual starting point of this project.  These instances of laughter worked as knots or bumps in the text, if you ran over them too fast you were bumped out of the narrative arc and readerly experience, into the lived reality of you and your body holding a book and reading words. I think a formative moment for this project was Nathanael West’s “ha-ha, he said” that added to the uncannily scripted but dangerously unpredictable experience of reading Day of the Locust. West’s refusal (inability?) to represent laughter in the traditional “ha-ha” model revealed the incomprehensibility of laughter, its life outside of representation and in singular performance.

Upon close inspection of a series of laughing moments, I began to see that the rupture of the artifice of the text by this invocation of laughter distracts us from a more fundamental rupture, that of the ontological model of being that traditionally structures Western philosophy. Humor studies uses laughter to fastidiously maintain the subject-object dyad, repeatedly and loudly asserting that laughter works to cleanse and maintain the political subject. Part of this project is to historicize these articulations of “humor” to show how they distort laughter to fit their own political ends. This is a deliberately Foucauldian approach, and I think that his observations of the intersection of power and knowledge map onto the history of laughter, which is continually silenced and contained by the twin structures of humor studies and social etiquette.

This is not an archaeology.  The plan is not to recover a suppressed archive of laughter from specific cultural moments in order to write a retrospective of the damage wrought by these perfect crystalline structures of humor studies.  Rather than resuscitating forgotten laughter, I seek explosive laughter, laughter that seeks to push through and past the obsession with separation, containment, and essence that dominates Western philosophy and politics.  This laughter is experienced by the narrator as horror, and in each case is deeply tied to the problem of the unrepresentable, the inexplicable, and the unknown. Laughter is a kind of body horror. Without our consent, it hijacks the body, and still, after thousands of years of critical attention, we cannot account for its origins. This project does not seek to “know” or “master” laughter, but to encounter it in all its opacity and then ask not what it is, but what it does.

A POETICS OF LAUGHTER

Black humor is misconstrued as nihilistic and apathetic because critics fail to recognize that its political activism is taking place through a philosophically radical laughter, rather than a satirical humor.  Close attention is usually paid only to the first principle of black humor, its cultivation of a moral and aesthetic flatness.  This flatness, on its own, perpetrates the same violence as the bomb, the terror of political and physical annihilation is recapitulated as a narrative strategy.  Black humor’s project falls into view when we begin to interpret these flattenings not as apocalyptic ends in themselves, but as fertile terrain for the creation of an errant laughter. This laughter extends out beyond the text and infects the reader, teaching a new mode of engaging with the world based on an “enjoyment of relation” rather than an “ontological obsession with knowledge.  Calling upon the laughter that spills over the borders of texts, a readerly laughter, as evidence for a poetics of Relation may seem theoretically crude.  Perhaps it seems so because it is impossible to map, it is infinite and noncalculable, existing beyond the texts in embodied, desirous communities that form, however momentarily, around them.  It is precisely in these unmappable zones of readerly laughter that resistance against the universalizing, annihilating maxims of a Western-Christian cosmology becomes possible.  These communities of laughter, like the Bokononist karass, are continually in creation across multiple times and spaces.  Both fugitive and boundless, opaque and anti-cognitive, this laughter undermines existing systems of knowledge and mastery, and instead embodies the principles of a new ontological framework, a poetics of Relation. 

WHAT IS LAUGHTER

A Tickle Me Elmo doll, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, an interminably looped .gif file of Natalie Portman laughing at the 2011 Golden Globe Awards, the “laughing network” of sentient plants in Joan Slonczewski’s SF novel The Highest Frontier, an ink printout of a fMRI scan of a brain in the moment of laughter, the brutal Italian giallo film The House With Laughing Windows, the online obsession with identifying gaping happy faces in inanimate objects, and the canned laughter or “Laff Box” premiered by CBS on The Hank McClune Show in 1950.

Following Aristotle’s claim that laughter is an “ensouling mechanism,” the anthropocentrically-minded field of humor studies has built itself upon the assumption that laughter is an exclusively “human” response to humor. Humor studies busies itself with producing rigid taxonomies of humor, from slapstick to satire, to rationally explain why we laugh. Instead of asking “What is funny to us?” this blog begins with a different question: what is laughter? Disassociated from humor (studies) and considered as an object in itself, the truly weird nature of laughter - as an irrational, involuntary, and disruptive force - comes into view. 

My first claim is that the everydayness of laughter, its fleshy domesticity, has obscured its fundamental unintelligibility. By selecting moments of laughter decontextualized from humor, I hope to make visible the basic withdrawal of laughter from rational explanation or scientific study.  The Elmo doll, the Tanganyika population, the severed images of Portman, the canned laughter tapes - they laugh without reason, over and over, until the batteries run out. 

My second claim is that laughter disrupts being; it shakes us from our selves. For a laughing moment, Elmo becomes a corporeal presence, Natalie Portman becomes a flat, repetitious tone, a house becomes a psychotic killer, the Tanganyika people become a single body, the recorded laughter of disappeared, deceased people activates laughter in an armchair audience of a CBS sitcom.  Laughter reveals itself as at once mechanical and corporeal, archival and non-calculable, contagious and alienating, inanimate and convulsive.

This blog argues that the dilation of perspective from human humor to alien laughter opens up a new philosophical space in which laughter, far from proving our humanity or reinforcing our status as rational subjects, serves to disrupt these anthropocentric ontological presumptions, and map a new philosophical terrain, in which objects, subjects, things, and humans are in perpetual withdrawal from, and active relation with, one another.