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.