Abstract
From a commonsense perspective, an outburst of laughter appears to demonstrate little more than a lack of subjective will; it certainly does not register as having political significance. Yet, this is also to render the political in commonsense terms. As the emerging body of literature on the question of the micropolitical suggests, there is, beneath the essentially representational sphere of macropolitics, a micropolitics of affective force. In exploring the political potential of eruptions of laughter, I argue that grasping the novelty of the micropolitical requires that we shift debate away from the scalar questions of large and small, towards the distinction between the ordinary and the singular. Untoward laughter, by protracting the process through which affective force crosses a threshold of perception and becomes remarkable, draws attention to the micropolitics of everyday life. In pursuing this argument, first, I draw on the work of Helmuth Plessner to make a case for the fundamentally ‘undecidable’ nature of laughter: laughter expresses an ‘answer’ to an unanswerable situation. Yet, I argue that Plessner’s phenomenological explanation of laughter is insufficiently sensitive to the micropolitics of bodies, their affective and intensive transformations. Second, then, I draw on Nietzsche’s critique of the sovereignty of subjective will, arguing that the ‘I’ who laughs is merely the dominant drive among a series of conflicting drives. Finally, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold, to show that such drives are never ‘mine’. As untoward laughter demonstrates so clearly, the events of the world are always constituted through much more dynamic foldings of material and incorporeal forces.
Introduction
One. Towards the end of a report on the first recorded sound waves, BBC news reader, Charlotte Green, plays a short segment of warbling that is barely recognizable as Debussy’s Clair de Lune. As she follows into the next segment, reporting the death of writer and producer Abby Mann, we are struck by her faltering voice. Several ‘excuse me’s’ cannot hide the fact that the normally sober formality of the BBC World Service is being usurped by unbridled hilarity. Later we learn that the laughing fit was ‘triggered’ by her producer’s own laugh and the comment that the first recording of the human voice sounded much like ‘a bee in a bottle’. Green later apologized to the family of Abby Mann.
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Two. At the funeral of a good friend’s father, the organist launches into the well-loved hymn, Abide With Me. Using a timing only known to herself, she begins the second bar without any pause and catches the parishioners unaware. Some of us try to gamely keep time with the organist, while others stick grimly to the timing that they know from years of habit. Suddenly the whole congregation is singing Abide with Me in rounders! I spy my partner next to me, as she starts to shake uncontrollably, gripped by mirth that must remain silent. Tears stream down her face and some gather on the end of her nose. Obviously infectious, I turn my laugh into a grimace as my partner turns hers to feigned sobs. Quite a reaction to the death of someone she had never actually met. Her sobbing was excused as an understandable emotional response: her own mother was dying. Three. Reporting on a gruesome murder case, a newsreader is seemingly caught off guard. An unlikely, bug-eyed mug-shot of Stephen Grant, the man accused of murder and dismemberment of his wife, Tara Lynn Grant, is flashed on screen as the newsreader recounts details of his capture and arrest, barely managing to keep an outburst of laughter at bay. The timing of the escaping giggles in the newscast was peculiarly inappropriate, sprinkled throughout such choice phrases as ‘a torso and body parts [laughter] of . . . who was believed to be the mother of two was found in and around the Grant home’.
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The laughter in these cases is not easy: the lightness that is usually associated with laughter is clearly inseparable from a weighty context. In the tension between the act of laughing and a context with which such laughter is normatively at odds, we have an awkward moment drawn out. It is in this drawn-out moment that we are privy to a generative process, which is not peculiar to laughter, though certain kinds of laughter provide the opportunity to espy its mechanism. The loss of control associated with such uneasy laughter is crucial here. According to Helmuth Plessner, ‘when we laugh . . . the objective manipulation of the situation is, for the time being over’, and certainly, once laughter has been set in train, it is very difficult to stop it mid-flight. 3 Laughter must, as Plessner suggests, play itself out. 4 Yet, despite this involuntary dimension of laughter, we also hold the laugher responsible in some sense. We expect an apology for laughter at inappropriate events or in unfortunate situations, and we call into question the character of the laugher who is context insensitive. 5 Laughter is thus enrolled into a series of dualisms. It sits problematically between voluntarism and involuntarism; it is deemed an eruption of the body or seen as a product of an insufficiently guarded ego; and it betrays, depending on one’s perspective, an insufficient will or an over-abundance of desire. This article inserts itself into this space between voluntarism and determinism, between corporeality and incorporeality and between will and desire. Laughter, sitting problematically as it does between these oppositions, serves as a vehicle to explore and extend some of the preoccupations of theoretically informed human geography in recent decades in the light of critiques of the sovereign subject 6 and affective geographies of the body, which variously challenge conventional notions of social action. 7
My argument is that laughter, and specifically poorly controlled eruptions of laughter, has a micropolitical potential for geographical thought and for our understanding of social action. As the growing interest by geographers in the question of micropolitics indicates, the commonsense understanding of the political dominant in the Western representational tradition is poorly equipped to account for the more molecular, affective and productive dimensions of the political. 8 As Himada and Manning note, ‘capital P’ politics, precisely because it ‘operates in the sphere of representation where precomposed bodies are already circulating’, misses much of what is political in social and cultural life. 9 Given that the representational presumptions that found our commonsense understanding of politics deny the political much of its inventiveness, Deleuze and Guattari’s injunction that ‘every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’ is a crucial one. 10 Or, to put it in Jellis and Gerlach’s terms, ‘. . . micropolitics and the minor are always, already present; it is what one makes of it as a mode of action that matters’. 11
In examining the phenomenon of poorly controlled laughter, this article does not seek to prescribe such laughter as a tool for political transformation or as a coping mechanism. 12 As I have argued elsewhere, laughter’s political potential is far more indeterminate than this. 13 My aim here is to demonstrate that, as a mode of action that falls between volition and involuntarism, poorly controlled laughter sharpens our understanding of the micropolitical. Micropolitics should not be understood as a smaller version of ‘Politics’, for this would be to reduce a non-representational phenomenon to a representational frame. 14 This claim, while crucial to understanding the novelty of the idea of micropolitics, is not a straightforward one, given that the notion of the ‘micro’ has historically connoted smallness. Yet, the novelty and the inventiveness of the micropolitical can only be grasped if we shift the debate away from the scalar questions of large and small and towards the distinction between the ordinary and the singular. In this, Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz in The Fold provides crucial insight. 15 Inflecting the understanding of untoward laughter through Deleuze’s discussion of microperception, I argue that micropolitics is much more than a politics of the small; indeed, it may extend our perception of the political towards the cosmos. We hardly notice solar flares or the molecules of salt in our nostrils at the beach, though of course there are political situations in which these might rise above the threshold of noticeability.
Not merely a question of scalar difference, then, the micropolitical is better grasped as a politics of the event, and thus in terms of an attunement to the points of inflection through which the ordinary crosses the threshold of perception and becomes remarkable. What makes the notion of micropolitics important today is that so much of contemporary social, political and cultural life operates at this threshold between the ordinary and the remarkable. 16 My argument here is that, untoward laughter protracts the process through which affective force crosses a threshold of perception and becomes remarkable. Rather than judge such laughter as an aberrant happening or subjective deficiency, I would thus like in this article to suggest that we see it as a prototype for the micropolitical event, where the event is ‘not so much the drastic irruptive gesture, but rather the incipient tendencies of material folds, several of which burn within our bodies subtly . . .’. 17
In prosecuting this argument, first, I argue that instances of untoward laughter point the way beyond the figure of the sovereign subject, which, among other things, founds the representational notion of politics (action as the rational and willed acts of sovereign beings). Drawing on Plessner, I make a case for the fundamentally ‘undecidable’ nature of laughter. 18 As Plessner puts it, laughter is a response to an ‘unanswerable situation’, which is to say that undecidability characterises both the objective situation and the subject’s cognitive limits in responding to it. 19 For Plessner, this undecidability arises from the peculiarly human duality of being and having a body. But this duality is already too late for micropolitics, so to speak. As Massumi suggests, thinking the micropolitical requires that we start, not with the subject/object relation but in the middle, with ‘the dynamic unity of an event’. 20 Thus, while Plessner provides fertile insights into the nature of laughter, his phenomenological account ultimately attributes causal power to the object and subject of laughter. My claim is that, these determinations are themselves actualisations from a more primary virtual potential – the field of microperceptual relations, which untoward laughter so effectively makes visible. For a specifically geographical appreciation of laughter, what is important here is that laughter’s irreducibility to the subject be grasped. The important distinction here is not between laughter and humour, as though privileging laughter provides a necessarily less representational account of things. 21 As Deleuze insists, humour, as an art of surfaces, is itself not an ideal cause, of which laughter would be the mere effect. 22 If, then, the article focuses less on humour than on untoward laughter, it is not because I see the humour/laughter relationship as a necessarily representational one. Rather, it is to stress the evental nature of micropolitics and to figure untoward laughter as an exemplary glimpse into this pre-personal virtuality and its unfolding into the domain of the actual. 23
With an eye to producing a thought that is more sensitive to micropolitical, affective and intensive transformation, second, I draw on Nietzsche’s critique of the sovereignty of subjective will. I argue, following Nietzsche, that the ‘I’ who laughs ‘about something’ is not so much the ego as the dominant drive among a series of conflicting drives. Finally, I work through Deleuze’s exposition of the relationship between the micropolitical and the microperceptual, arguing that eruptions of untoward laughter represent a crossing of a threshold of perception; as such, they draw our attention to ‘a brewing, the world stirring’ and ‘a coming event’. 24 I conclude that untoward laughter is a form of social action that keenly highlights the ‘unanswerability’ of the events of the world. While such laughter is not meaningless, nor does it claim to solve the problem of our encounter with the world, as more apparently rational action might. Unwitting eruptions of laughter reveal the excessive character of life with respect to human intellect and experience. They draw attention to the problematic character of our relation to the world, reminding us that the human being is never at the centre of the forces of the world, but constituted through their modulations. In turn, these modulations are the result of the swarming of microperceptual qualities, which are actualised as the subject, the world and its objects.
Laughter: answering the unanswerable situation
The name commonly given to unwitting eruptions of laughter in untoward, and often public, circumstances is ‘corpsing’. The word derives from the actor who, supposedly playing the role of a corpse, is overcome by an uncontrollable urge to laugh, and it is used more loosely in the theatrical context to refer to actors who break character by bursting into inappropriate laughter. 25 This sense of a break in character also applies in the field of ‘presence research’ in the experiential design of computer-based systems, where ‘corpsing’ describes the process whereby gamers fall out of character, no longer buying into the illusion of the computer-based environment. 26 It is the fertility of these multiple but related meanings of corpsing that I exploit in the following analysis.
Plessner makes an important contribution to the understanding of the complexity of what is at stake when ‘I’ laugh. In seeking to explain the phenomenon of corpsing, Plessner gives a central role to the body, but not at the expense of cognition. It is the peculiar link between laughter and cognition that he associates with the accountable nature of laughter. While we may be mildly embarrassed by overly loud belching or by uncontrollable rhinorrhea, we can pretty much blame our bodies for these autonomic reactions. To the question, ‘why are you sniffing or sneezing?’ we can turn immediately to our body or, more specifically, our body’s interaction with the environment: ‘it’s my allergies’, ‘I have a cold’. The answer to the question, ‘why are you laughing?’ is, as Plessner points out, quite different from these responses involving the autonomic nervous system. For Plessner, ‘why are you laughing?’ is not an unreasonable question, which is to say, that it can and should be liable to reason. And we expect an answer that somehow involves cognition: To laughing belongs – and if not the concepts are misplaced – the significant and conscious relating of an expression to its occasion, an expression which breaks out eruptively, runs its course compulsively, and lacks definite symbolic form. It is not my body, but I who laugh for a reason, ‘about something’.
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Plessner cannot be straightforwardly categorised according to the now well rehearsed principle theories of laughter, namely, the Superiority, Incongruity and Relief theses. 28 However, he shares with these theories the tendency to read laughter as symptomatic of an inner state, as saying something not about the body of the laugher but about the laugher ‘themselves’ and their relationship to the world. While he does not hold that laughter is entirely voluntary, Plessner does maintain that there is a sense in which we are personally implicated in it.
It is the problematic character of laughter with respect to the problems of voluntarism and involuntarism that makes the process of judging laughter typically both important and difficult. It is, for example, the idea that the subject could exercise his or her will and choose not to laugh that underpins the use of laughter as evidence in the mens rea component of the criminal act; laughter can be used in court as an indication of wilfulness and thus as the basis of a judgement of wilfully criminal action. We can recall cases of defendants in the dock smiling or laughing inappropriately, which to most witnesses appear as a sign of insufficient recognition of the solemnity of the occasion; the case of the Bali bomber, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, is pertinent here. 29 In the case of the Abu Ghraib guard, Lyndie England, the prosecution employed the superiority thesis to argue that a lack of feeling in the face of obvious suffering was evinced by her laughter. However, her legal defence team used a line of reasoning akin to the relief theory of humour to argue that her laughter was an unconscious and therefore involuntary response to the situation she found herself in, given her weak personality, her lowly rank and her assigned role of interrogating prisoners. 30 In both cases, the treatment of laughter as an object of judgement pivoted around the problem of subjective will – its strength or constitutive vulnerability.
I would like to raise the question of whether the judgement of laughter and of the will of the laugher is a philosophically productive and politically helpful way of approaching this phenomenon. My reluctance to elevate judgement as the mode of best relating to humour does not stem from an anxiety about appearing like a fun spoiler or an anxiety about being labelled on that most unhelpful continuum of political correctness or incorrectness. My reluctance, rather, pertains to the hypostatisation of the states in such analyses – the subject, the object and the situation. As Maria Hynes demonstrates in her analysis of the problem of indifference, neither the subject nor the situation stand immobilised as states that would allow for a timely judgement. 31 My argument here is that the phenomenon of laughter challenges the sovereignty of the subject, not merely by adding to it a normative dimension of sociality (as Superiority Theory would have it), an unconscious (as per Relief theory) or a complex relationship to meaning (Incongruity theory). Rather, laughter challenges the subject much more thoroughly and, with it, the notion of the will that orients judgement.
There is a coeval positing of the structures of subject and object in the standard way that we think about laughter. Our usual understanding of laughter is that we determine ‘something’ as funny: we can identify something which makes us laugh, and in this way, our tendency is to focus on the object of laughter. The subjective corollary of this, found in Plessner, is that what we find laughable is more complicated than this objective focus implies, insofar as our explanation of what we laugh at involves a subjective element. Plessner insists that there is something in the physical relations into which we enter that sets laughing in train. However, Plessner also holds that the laughter we experience is more than simply physical stimulation: Laughter at tickling is as much about our relationship with the tickler as it is about the movements she makes with her hand. We laugh at what this person is doing to us in these circumstances.
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Thus, we characteristically regard laughter as more than merely bodily and in pointing to the causal mechanisms of laughter we give at least a minimal role to the cognition of the laughing subject. This habit of seeing laughter as a subjective response to something in the world is made especially explicit in a classic scientific study of ‘the brain mechanisms of humour’. 33 Fried et al. present the case of a patient who received an ‘electric stimulation of the anterior part of the supplementary motor area of the brain’ and found that the stimulation ‘consistently produced laughter’ and that the laughter ‘was accompanied by a sense of merriment and mirth’. 34 Fried et al. conclude that this region of the brain, the anterior sensory motor area (SMA), is thus the locus of a motor sensory reaction, where affective and cognitive aspects of laughter have a common junction. Yet, they note that the patient felt compelled to explain her laughter, ‘attributing the laughter to whatever external stimulus was present’. 35 The laughter, which Fried et al. knew to be caused by this electric stimulation, was explained by the patient through reference to whatever cognitive stimulus was closest at hand: ‘you doctors looked funny standing there!’ 36 For Fried et al., then, this is a pathological, or at best, confused response to the problem of the explanation of laughter; as far as they are concerned, the cause of the laughter was merely the excitation which they delivered.
Plessner, however, gives what we regard as a more recognisably human sense of what it means to be a being in the world. Certainly, there might be something retrospective about the cognition in the example of the patient who laughs while receiving an electrical stimulus, later citing the funny looking doctors as the source of her laughter. Yet, clearly some sort of interpretation has occurred here to make sense of what is funny and we cannot escape the notion that, to quote Plessner, ‘[i]t is not my body but I who laugh . . . and for a reason, “about something”’.
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For Plessner, then, Laughter properly called is a meaningful, expressive behavior. It is meaningful in two ways. First, it refers to something other than itself, namely, the occasion that elicits it. So when we see a person or persons laughing, we assume that they are laughing for a reason that at least someone, perhaps the laughers themselves, could indicate to us. We assume, that is, that there is some answer to some variant of the question, ‘What’s that all about?’ The second way in which laughter is meaningful is by being expressive (or we could say self-referential). Laughter bodies forth something about the laugher herself, whether it is that she is joyful, titillated, full of fun, amused, embarrassed, or despairing.
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For his part, Plessner places such emphasis on the cognitive element of laughter that he would probably hesitate to refer to some forms of laughter as real laughter. In the case of gelastic epilepsy, for example, where laughter is not associated with feelings of pleasure, but often with real misery, the necessary cognitive element seems to him to be lacking.
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Explaining the sense in which Plessner sees laughter as an expression of the person who laughs, Prusak writes the following: So-called pathological laughter, which occurs as a symptom of pseudobulbar palsy, gelastic epilepsy and psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, does not express, but suppresses its victim’s personality. As the clinical literature is careful to note, it is in fact problematic in these instances to speak of laughter unproblematically since the victim of pathological laughter does not so much laugh as suffer paroxysms of ‘mock laughter’.
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In indicating the way that ‘laughter bodies forth something about the laugher herself’, Plessner goes a long way towards showing the confused origins of the subjective states of mirth and pleasure. 41 He does, however, emphasise the cognitive element of laughter in such a way as to reproduce the kind of sovereign subject that I think needs to be called into question – not simply, as I will argue, for political reasons, but because an analysis of the phenomenon of laughter demands it. So, where Plessner insists that ‘[i]t is not my body but I who laugh’, it is still important to question who this ‘I’ is. To put it another way, the question of what does the interpreting in the attribution of meaning to the event of laughter remains, for me, an open one. To be clear, this article is not an attempt to find a subject at the basis of an action. Rather, it serves to challenge the model of thought that places ideality, cognition or thought as master and matter or the body as slave. 42 More than this, it challenges the idea that laughter is best understood as an objective, or a subjective phenomenon, by focusing on the evental nature of the production of subject, object and laughter. 43
Nietzsche and the drive to laughter
Following Nietzsche, then, I would like to suggest that what ‘interprets’ is not the ego or even consciousness but rather a prevailing drive in a field of competing ones. In his polemic against commonsense understandings of volition, Nietzsche argues that because we feel like we have willed one of our actions, it suffices as an explanation for that action, yet ‘the faith in the will as the cause of effects is the faith in magically effective forces’. 44 The curious taken-for-grantedness of the will is both a support to and a result of a mind–body dualism, where the flesh has traditionally been the stuff at the bidding of the mind. Nietzsche critiques this version of subjectivity, offering instead an image of the individual as a (battle) field of competing drives that we scarcely understand. The appellation ‘I’ is given to that drive that emerges victorious and noticeable, but not before numerous drives have become invisible or subdued. 45 Nietzsche argues that the unproblematic ‘brute datum’ of the will needs to be replaced with one that must include the ingredients of pleasure and displeasure. 46 Pleasure and displeasure depend on the interpretation of a stimulus by the intellect, which, Nietzsche writes, ‘to be sure, does this work without rising to our consciousness: one and the same stimulus can be interpreted as pleasure or displeasure’. 47
In an example germane to the topic here, Nietzsche writes: Suppose we were in the market place one day and we noticed someone laughing at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us – and it will be a quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world – and in each case, a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance, or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. This drive seized the event as its prey. Why precisely this one? Because, thirsty and hungry, it was lying in wait.
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Here, Nietzsche understands the response to the event of laughter in terms of a series of competing drives. Importantly, as far as the critique of the sovereignty of subjectivity is concerned, it is the gratification of the drives that explains what we will come to call ‘the subject’s’ response to the situation, rather than a willed decision. Nietzsche is right to emphasise, in the quote I referred to earlier in the article, that displeasure or pleasure might be important in understanding how the will responds to stimuli and, again, he is correct in claiming that this might not rise to consciousness. We can hardly say that we decide to laugh or not to laugh, as though the ‘about something funny’ was laid in front of the laughing subject as a funny object, since this sense of the decision presumes the givenness of subjective and objective structures of experience, rather than accounting for their genesis.
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Judgement – the weighing up of options – offers a poor understanding for deliberation, let alone the bodily heavy response of laughter. The model of the self that weighs up options (to laugh or not laugh, for example) falsifies the nature of deliberation: if neither the options nor the self ever change, how could I ever arrive at a decision? The truth of the matter is that, during the entire time the deliberation is going on, the self is constantly changing, and consequently is modifying the two feelings that are agitating it. What Leibniz (and Bergson, for that matter) calls a ‘free’ act will be an act that effectuates the amplitude of my soul at a certain moment, the moment the act is undertaken. It is an act that integrates the small perceptions and small inclinations into a remarkable inclination, which then becomes an inclination of the soul.
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In moving beyond the image of subjective choice implied in our conventional understanding of the will, we need also to challenge the habitual ways in which we relate context to the problem. While the marketplace serves, for Nietzsche, as a kind of neutral background to the case in consideration, I am interested in the role that this spatial context plays in the constitution of the event. To return to one of the instances with which I opened the article, what constitutes the event of corpsing, as much as the mistimed hymn of ‘Abide With Me’ and the irreverence of my partner, are all the minute perceptions that a funeral prehends. Thus, we would most accurately say that, rather than the capacity for laughter being an attribute of the subject, the event of laughter gathers together and expresses a multitude of inclinations, which involve the material and incorporeal dimensions of what will be actualised as a subject, but also the funeral or marketplace. While this focus shares with post-phenomenological geographies an insistence on the emergent rather than a priori nature of experience, 51 I argue that the micropolitical significance of going beyond the subject and object of empirical experience consists of opening to a virtuality that, while determinable, is not yet determined. As Massumi suggests, politics involves the ‘art’ of the differential capacitation of bodies, tapping into the ‘reservoir of political potential’, which, he insists, is ‘immediately collective’.
Understanding the potential of untoward laughter in this respect involves moving beyond the individual/social opposition that grounds dominant theories of laughter, which are, accordingly, normative in orientation. We can recall that the Superiority Theory of humour posits that we laugh to establish or maintain a superior relation to another. Some behaviours are more highly valued in certain contexts than others and a normatively deficient behaviour is ripe for ridicule; the golden rule here is that the further one enters the public realm, the more one is susceptible to embarrassment. Those who support the Relief Theory of humour work very much with a private/public divide. 52 Laughter occurs as a form of release in the playing out of the tension between our sense of ourselves as moral beings and our more id-like drives, which revel in base motives. A public context serves as a staging ground where this tension and the stakes are highest. Finally, for Incongruity Theory, a mismatch occurs between content and context, which challenges perceptual expectations – the jolliness of rounders sung in a cemetery chapel, to recall the example from the second vignette.
The emphasis in each of these theories is on laughter’s relationship to normative regulation. The context – whether it is BBC radio, a funeral or international TV – serves to highlight, as well as exacerbate, the tensions involved in normative life. It is also the case that, in each of the three principal theories of laughter, laughter is understood through reference to the attributes of the subject-in-context. One laughs because specific contexts highlight something essential about one’s existence as a social being – that my sociality involves normative relations of power (in the case of Superiority Theory) – creates a tension between my desires and moral norms (for Relief Theory) or produces habits and norms of perception (in Incongruity Theory).
Yet, these normative arguments, while certainly having explanatory power, do not exhaust the analysis of corpsing. I have been attempting to open a space for a mode of explanation that moves beyond the more attributive theories of laughter. Specifically, I have sought to challenge the image of a subject who pre-exists the event of laughter. On this, we can recall Nietzsche’s ontological privileging of competing drives; the assumption of a subject who wills a decision is in Nietzsche’s view a ‘regulative fiction’ that has well and truly reached its use-by date. In suggesting, then, that the ‘I’ does not pre-exist the event of laughter, my aim is to move beyond an attributive, towards a more event-based, understanding of laughter. With the more attributive theories of humour, laughter is viewed as a rare and aberrant event. It arises from what Paulo Virno would refer to as a kind of state of exception, a moment in which rules are, however temporarily, broken and the state of affairs is briefly transformed. 53 Yet, this notion that the production of novelty is a rarity holds only to the extent that we view laughter against the backdrop of the normative life, where regulation is the rule and aberration the exception.
Folding the event
Against this construction of the relationship between potentiality and actuality, I would like to briefly consider the contribution made by Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz in his book, The Fold, to the theory of the event. Reading Leibniz through the lens of Whitehead’s process philosophy, Deleuze constructs a philosophy that moves away from attribution, towards the event. The analytical starting point of his thought is not the social domain of rule and regulation but, rather, the chaotic multiplicity that both exceeds and conditions the social. This ontological commitment to a world in which difference dominates, rather than identity and the rule, already shifts the thought of the event beyond its merely empirical determinations. For an event, in its more Deleuzian and micropolitical sense, is no longer what happens to things already given in their identity. Or, as Deleuze puts it, ‘an event does not just mean that “a man has been run over”’. Similarly, while we attribute an objective cause to our laughter (‘you doctors looked funny standing there!’), the event as such includes and prehends an almost infinite number of relations that our attribution necessarily fails to capture. The event seizes upon the minute differences, affective fluctuations and tiny becomings that constitute reality. These become the data of our attributions (‘I’ laughed at something), but these attributions are necessarily a reductive account of the event that we call laughter.
The eruptive nature of untoward laughter should not mislead us as to its cause. To put it differently, our perception of a-subject-who-laughs is confused in its clarity, since what prehends the event is a multiplicity of tendencies, ‘the incipient tendencies of material folds’ (Dewsbury, 2013: 143). 54 In the case of the BBC report with which I opened the article, the event of laughter prehends a multitude of minute perceptions: a buzzing vibration of sound, memory traces of obituary announcements, the shortness of breath of the producer in the background, the tension in the diaphragm and the accumulating vibrations of the body of the reader, and so on. From the point of view of the will, we could say that the attribution of a cause (‘I laughed because . . .’) is misleading. 55 As I have suggested following Nietzsche, it is not ‘I’ who wills. Rather, what wills are the diverse inclinations or drives that traverse the body, until one ‘wins out’ and is expressed. This is not to say, however, that in the case of laughter, an outburst is purely autonomic. It is to insist, rather, that the event can only be analytically approached when we move beyond the familiar territory of an attributive schema, positing as it does subjects who either succeed or fail to exercise will in the face of objective causes.
What Deleuze’s reading of the event in The Fold contributes is an understanding of the virtuality of events. He offers a theorisation of the process by which we move from an obscure, yet potential-rich expression of minute, unconscious perceptions to a clear perception. The reference to ‘unconscious’ here is not meant to denote something that could be said to be the property of the subject, as would be the case in the more attributive schema at the heart of Freudian-inspired relief theory. Rather, to speak of unconscious perceptions is to refer to those minute and obscure perceptions that an event prehends (the affective tensions and resonances of the funeral, the timbre of an organ, the syncopation of voices). The event prehends all these unconscious perceptions, though only some of these elements will be registered in consciousness via a process of selection or screening.
On this, Deleuze writes that ‘events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes’.
56
Deleuze analyses this process of screening, whereby some of the obscure perceptions prehended in an event become remarkable and register in consciousness, ‘from a psychic point of view’. Deleuze writes: From a psychic point of view, chaos would be a universal giddiness, the sum of all possible perceptions being infinitesimal or infinitely minute; but the screen would extract differentials that could be integrated in orderly perceptions.
57
Interestingly, for the analysis of corpsing, Plessner recognises that laughter involves a relation between the clear and the confused, though he resolves this question in more phenomenological terms than I would. In his discussion of the work of Plessner, Prusak writes that ‘in Leibniz’s terms, we may know clearly that a remark is funny, while knowing only confusedly how it is so’.
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Prusak goes on to explain: . . . we may know what we are laughing about without knowing just what makes it laughable. Our awareness of the occasion of our laughter may vary in distinctness. Further, we may be unsure of, perplexed by, or even oblivious to what our laughter discloses about us. In other words, what laughter expresses may exceed what it means to the laugher, or what the laugher takes it to mean.
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Ultimately, as I have suggested through Nietzsche, Plessner’s phenomenological claim that ‘it is not the body that laughs, but I who laugh, about something’ needs to be reinterpreted in the light of the critique of the sovereign will. For the ‘I’, following Nietzsche, is not the given that phenomenology takes it to be, but is merely the dominant drive at any moment in the battleground of conflicting and multiple drives. Moreover, from the point of view of the body, a phenomenological approach assumes the experiencing body as a given, rather than as the effect of processes of continual creation, movement and individuation. 60
The limitations of a phenomenological approach are evident here in Prusak’s reading of Leibniz, and especially in the assumption that confusion about the source of our laughter represents a subjective deficit of sorts. While both Prusak and Plessner register that the laughter’s explanations for his or her laughter are only part of the picture, this does not for them mitigate the question of responsibility for laughing. Yet, rather than succumb to the misguided understanding of the will that underpins such accounts of responsibility, I have been suggesting that the ‘confusion’ to which Prusak refers is less an expression of a subjective deficit than of an ontological state of flux.
Micropolitically oriented geographies are today seeking to gesture towards the potential of this ontological reality of differentiation and becoming. I have stressed that it is crucial that the micropolitics of the event not be reduced to a smaller version of capital ‘P’ politics, which would be to confuse a non-representational phenomenon with a representational one. I have also suggested that grasping this point involves an appreciation of the ‘micro’ as something other than ‘the small’. While the event is constituted by minute and barely perceptible differences, it is less their smallness than their relative imperceptibility that is the key. Or, to put it more accurately, it is the process by which the unremarkable crosses a threshold of perception and becomes singular that makes the micropolitical what it is. In the closing section of the article, then, I aim to indicate what the importance of this micropolitical sense of the event is for geography and why I think untoward laughter can serve as a fascinating window onto it.
Conclusion: the potentials of corpsing
Following Plessner, I have suggested that laughter is a response to an ‘unanswerable situation’. Laughter is the expressive reaction of disorganisation – when we are suddenly confronted with the problem of ‘what do we do with that?’ Plessner writes: Comic phenomena, scenes, actions, persons are, as appearances, in themselves ambiguous and paradoxical for our apprehension. They never leave us in peace and yet never offer any prospect that we can ‘do anything’ with them.
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Plessner’s rich theorisation of this expressive phenomenon highlights that there is a productivity associated with laughter, precisely because it does not settle on an object, but rather remains at the level of the unanswerable, even if our habits of attribution inevitably bring it into the domain of sense. Yet, I have also suggested that Plessner’s phenomenological perspective assumes too much; that it remains too normatively oriented to the subject of laughter; and that its (micro) political significance is thereby limited.
Nietzsche’s critique of the sovereign subject of will offers a timely reinflection of the assertion that ‘it is I who laugh, about something’. Where Plessner’s association of the status of laughter with the problem of both being and having a body brings the problem of the body to the fore, the status of the ‘I’ in his phenomenology remains largely unproblematised. Following Nietzsche, in contrast, I have suggested that the ‘I’ who laughs is merely the appellation that we retrospectively give to the dominant drive, which at a given instant wins out over a series of competing drives. To speak of drives here is not, I have insisted, to evoke the Freudian sense of the drive, nor the Relief Theory of laughter with which Freud’s thought is associated, since both remain too oriented to the interiority of a subjective unconscious, as determined by the psychoanalytic frame. If there is a sense in which the notion of the unconscious lends itself to an understanding of laughter, it is a much more dispersed, materialist, collective and micropolitical sense of the unconscious that is at issue here. As Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz suggests, any clear perception that can be attributed as my perception is in fact confused in its clarity, since what precedes both the ‘I’ and the object perceived is a multitude of minute and unconscious perceptions. If it is true that ‘I laugh, about something’, that claim can now be read as an opening to the maximal productivity of the event, in relation to which the empirical state of affairs (the laughing subject; the object of laughter) is necessarily reductive.
If laughter, in all its confusedness, serves as a kind of prototype of the event, this is especially so in the case of untoward or out-of-context laughter. And it is here that geography’s attention to the spatial elements of social life proves especially instructive. Insofar as corpsing heightens the tension that laughing in this place generates, it also heightens the attentiveness of bodies to the other materialities and unconscious perceptions that any instant gathers together: a bug-eyed mug-shot, a sombre topic, an anticipating public, and a body tethering at the edge of control.
Geography’s turn to the micropolitics of the event is simultaneously a refusal of the dogmas of a sovereign view of subjectivity, in favour of a more open and productive multiplication of possibilities. Indeed, a micropolitically oriented thought, by going beyond the attempt to find a subject at the basis of action, can save us from the kind of ‘butler-did-it’ social science that supposedly trumps the naivety of less politically astute accounts. It also moves us beyond the notion that a critique of sovereignty in the sphere of the political is essentially a critique of state sovereignty. While such critiques have certainly been important, 62 my critique of the sovereign image of the subject of politics aims to gesture towards the micropolitical, a mode of the political that is as qualitatively different from molar politics as the microperceptual is from perception. Untoward laughter produces an acute and productive attunement to the crossing of new thresholds of perception, through which a once unremarkable state of affairs becomes singular. The point is not that untoward laughter represents a moment of out-of-control-ness that challenges sovereignty, understood as the ‘fantasy of self-ratifying control over a situation or space’. 63 Rather, it is that laughter points to an ontological space from which the subject is absent, or at least not yet actual. Untoward laughter slows down and amplifies the unfolding of the event in which a rich microperceptual, virtual field is coming into actuality. In the laughing actualisation of material inclinations and folds, which had previously been imperceptible, the world stirring and opening to new actualities is felt.
The ideas of affectivity and feeling have, of course, become increasingly important in efforts to rethink contemporary sociality and, specifically, the political. What I am suggesting here is that untoward laughter, as a prototype of the micropolitical event, opens a space in which we might attend to the ‘something happening’ 64 that is always happening, not with an eye to mobilising a given people but with the thought of otherwise tweaking the modulations of the real that are always already going on. We are today subject to ubiquitous and microcapillary modulations of subjectivity: at the level of the capital relation, through increasingly immaterial forms of labour and through the ever more performative operations of populist politics. In such a context, idealist images of a sovereign people stirring to political action feel out of place, and the spectre of a society of resigned individuals remains entirely within the logic of sovereign will. In seeking to move beyond this logic, it is a question of attuning ourselves to the potentials within the interstices of micropolitical spaces, inventing new ways of navigating them and generating novel forms of subjectivity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the incisive intellectual contribution of Maria Hynes and J-D Dewsbury to this paper. Thanks are also due to the 3 anonymous referees for their generous comments and to The Difference Lab for providing the stimulating environment for these ideas to flourish.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
