inscriptions mécaniques sur la vie: un teaser

Music: Anna Calvi: self-titled (2011)

The pace of RoseChron has slowed, hasn't it? When I reflect on how much less I've shared on the blog over the past year, I realize that the trade off is unquestionably professional "service." I have often used this blog as a space to work-through ideas, either on cultural issues of the time or in my own teaching and scholarship. When I'm not working-through here, it just means I'm doing work somewhere else. In recent years that somewhere else has been the space of others---graduates especially, but also colleagues as a blind reviewer for books or journal articles. When it's my own work, I don't have much trouble sharing "in public," but you know, when I'm working with others on their work, it's just not my place---this is not the place. For example, in a recent post I wrote about the work of others I had been reading---friends and students---and I almost didn't post it because I worried it wasn't my place (I decided that because the focus was on my worry, not their work, however, it was ok). In short: I've written less here as of late because I seem to become more invested in collaboration, in various forms, or alternately said, I've written less here because I've been writing less of my own in general.

This week, however, I've been working on my own stuff and am at that point where I can share some half-baked blatherings. Blogging about things I'm working on is often very helpful because of the way writing here causes a sort of switching-of-gears: here, the audience is very different from the one I write for on the page intended for print, or the audience I imagine sitting in front of me at a conference. The change-up in audiencing (who you are and whom I imagine), in other words, is helpful for the processes or labors of invention.

So?

I was asked some months ago to share some work in progress with a panel of distinguished visiting scholars on the topic of technology, memory, and rhetoric, and that moment of sharing is swiftly approaching [insert panicked, muffled scream here]. I agreed some months ago to share my work, knowing that it would give me a kick-in-the-pants to start drafting a chapter that only exists in the form of a lecture for the twelfth seminar in "the object" course. The title, "du mécanique plaque sur du vivant," is a phrase from Henri Bergson's famous formula for human laughter as this funky intersection of the machinic and the human. Laughing "breaks the frame" when, for example, a person seems much too "rigid" for the situation, or we find ourselves or others behaving a bit too robotically, like when Eddie Murphy does his impression of "white people." Bergson's ruminations on the comic are elegantly written and just a delight to read. Although his 1901 examples no longer track with the structures feeling (up/of) our times (sex is now the orifice of the funny bone), his views nevertheless remain relevant: there is a very thin membrane between the hilarious and the uncanny, and total satisfaction on either side risks a deathly puncture (jouissance, of course). Faced with the proverbial ghost in the machine, if you are on the side of Bergson you laugh and if you find yourself on side of Freud you scream. The notion "peals of laughter" captures both nicely.

Laugher indexes two levels of experience that, I think, we can figure as repetition and representation---incidentally, the two approaches to "rhetoric" that seem to be vying for dominance in scholarly circles in recent years. I'll be arguing a number of things on Friday (none of which can be developed in fifteen minutes), and among them a certain "psychoanalytic" extension or version of Diane Davis's argument for "a rhetoric of laughter" in her brilliant book, Breaking Up [at] Totality: a rhetorical approach to persuasion, or suggestive assent, or whatever it is we decide it is that we study, is a kind of dialectical navigation or preservation that does not collapse on the side of the machinic or the classically humanist, but unsteadily and never finally reckons with both. As Judith Butler puts it somewhere in Gender Trouble (I'm too lazy to look for a blog post), immanentist approaches to materiality or performativity as a concept should not disavow representation---as if we can do away with representation anyway. And I know the tension or approach between representational and alternative forms of rhetorical studies is on a lot of folks minds lately (perhaps it always was?); just today Nate Stormer said he was putting something together on the topic for our annual convention on the speech-side of rhetorical studies. Anyway, back in 2000 Diane posed laughter as a fecund object for thinking through the struggles of rhetorical studies to mourn the death of the humanist subject (she's always a decade ahead of the rest of us). Just let language "be," says Diane, stop trying to control it or make it do violence; let the laughter in, whatever it is, this "tropiate."

Of course, Davis doesn't recommend the kind of total-topple into difference-reveling either. It's to easy to advocate a party, and while I like a good party too we all know the damn thing can be quite destructive (cue scene's of Woodstock's aftermath). Embracing laughter entails the risk of many of those who embrace an affective pancreas (ignoring, for example, aggression can trend toward nihilism). I'm also quite taken with Alenka Zupančič's approach to the comedic as an interplay between repetition and representation, and while I'm still not quite clear on the finer distinctions between Deleuze and Lacan on repetition that she is careful to outline, I think Zupančič's lucid explanation of why Bergson errs too much on the side of humanism is compelling (Lacan is baby bear's porridge, you see, between a hot bowl of Deleuze that is difference all-the-way-down, and a humanist's representational pudding that stops at a spine or a brain, or something like that).

The challenge for me is to think these issues through the concept of memory, which is something that is assumed at the core of my current project but which is also something I've given short-shrift. Bradford Vivian's work on public memory and repetition has been quite helpful to me today, as has Kendall Phillips work on the topic. In a number of publications Kendall has explained how collective memory is fundamentally a rhetorical fashioning (rhetoric as re-membering), and Brad has helped me to make some connections with Deleuze. But what of laughter: isn't its seemingly automatic or spasm-like qualities associated with a kind of forgetting? Diane Davis suggests as much in Breaking Up, and to be certain there is a form of amnesia in our "laughing together" (and especially when it's at the expense of something Other). Not that amnesia is all bad---or that we can do away with it.

Well, I'm sort of floundering around here, which is par for the course when mucking through a constellation of stars that I think I know but whose collective form (an animal? a god? a kitchen utensil?) I cannot quite make out. Without giving too much away, I think I'll be taking laughter to the archive with Derrida: all compulsions, either the encyclopedic enterprise that is now "social media," to uncontrollable laughing, drive toward death. Yeah, where repetition is concerned the death drive churns and chafes against. This, I think, is the skeleton key: I'm just not sure which way it turns quite yet, or if its going to catch.

So, a parade of concepts: laughter, representation, repetition, jouissance, the (death) drive, memory, and the archive. It's a lot to cram into one short paper and, for the sake of sanity, I probably shouldn't. But these are the concepts of the larger chapter, and at its center is a fun-canny object. Here's a bit of the introduction I've been working on:

They probably found the Whistling Coon down by the Hudson, busking among the ferry-goers. For a small fee George Washington Johnson could whistle the popular tunes of the 1890s with alacrity and an uncanny accuracy. At that time New York was the seat of the entertainment industries, and gramophone peddlers were scrambling for those curious, cylindrical inscriptions that lured patrons to their coin-operated phonographs. Although a black man, Johnson's vocalic abilities were novel and minstrelsy was increasingly welcome as white Americans confronted their racial anxieties in popular entertainments. He was paid twenty-cents for every two-minute song he recorded for the phonographers, which was a lucrative enterprise when you consider at that time every recording made was a master: only three or four cylinders could be inscribed at once, the horns of the recording machines arranged around Johnson's resonant mouth. Within ten years technological innovation would enable the simultaneous inscription of multiple slave copies, even copies of copies such that, gradually, the master's voice---the master's recorded voice---became autonomous, needing that seat of inspiration, the diaphragm, just the once for innumerable ears. At first they desperately needed Johnson all day, every day, and then they didn't need him at all. By 1905 Johnson's recording career was over.

This march of inscriptive technology maps, in an unintended way, Henri Bergson's formula for laughter: "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." With nods to the original French phrasing of Bergson's formula (I dare not try to pronounce it unless you need a good laugh), we can also render laughter as something lawful encrusted upon the living. My remarks today will orbit a number of ways in which we can imagine the mechanical or lawful coming to bear upon that nominal domain of the human spirit, rendered variously as the "life impulse" in Bergson's account and, as we will see, jouissance in the theories of Jacques Lacan.

Now, at first blush the mechanical encrusted upon the living human voice betokens that all-too-familiar dialectical tension between what Marx dubbed the relations and forces of production; that our livelihoods always seem beholden yet resistant to technological contradictions is a hopelessly familiar regularity. But there are the mechanics of respiration too, some autonomic, some purposefully labored, and the law that is figured between them as signification. I've really begun with Johnson's example because his first, best-selling recording was not fixated on his unusual talent for whistling, but rather, on his ability to laugh in tune. Phonographers thought the racist song the "Whistling Coon," coupled by the fact that Johnson was the first African American on record, would secure their riches. It turned out, however, that the companion song---or what we would term the "b-side" today---became the runaway hit: "Laughing Song" purportedly sold over 25,000 copies by 1894 and was among the most popular phonographic cylinders of the late nineteenth century . . . .