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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
 
Mixing Metaphors or Comedy is Hard

  In a recent post apparently,  I disparaged anarchy and stand-up comedy as well, failing to give due consideration to the nobility and art of the anarchic intent,  anarchy that is inherent in the best comedy. I went low and inside and got called for it. What I need I see is a better mousetrap, a better metaphor rather (I should also stop spelling metaphor as methaphor in drafts), so that the world may beat the PATH train to my door. I have rolled this reply into an entry of its own because it took more effort than I expected to cobble together a suitably thoughtful response to maintain my cheap laugh at the expense of finer things. I can't afford to let that work go to waste. Thinking isn't easy for me.

 There is a good anarchy, I suppose. So there is good comedy.  As there is bad comedy, so there must be bad anarchy.  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the coiner of the term Anarchy as the comment to that post pointed out. His anarchy can be captured by three quotes from the wiki page cited by the commenter. They trace the following sentiments by measure:

Noble

What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy!

Philosophical

the government of each by himself", which meant "that political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges.

Vitriolic

 To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

As long as no one believed they owned the value of another's labor this web of contract relation was held to be self regulating and sustaining, and government could be withdrawn. The absence of authority was order. Against this is an intrusive chaotic anarchy. Even in rendered circumstance the boundaries of liberty are like the membrane of soap bubbles. A membrane that exists where your absolute infinite and inviolate [inviable] rights meet up against my absolute infinite and inviolate rights (and hisen and hersen's absolute infinite...etc. rights). This is not, of course, where people set their rights.  They, we, set our rights at the point we feel our liberty viscerally, and where find ourselves able to profit by them. A point where they already trespass well into those of others.

 There is bad comedy. Candidates for this include the muddle of situational stagings that have forgotten physical bodily elements; Muggings deadpans double-takes pratfalls, yet calls itself comedy.  Stand up comedy which mistakes its calling: to pull away the comforting falsehoods we cling to, and simply gives us more, following only a low need to be the center of any rooms attention. Worst is the banal comedy of dichotomy. You know the kind:  'there are two kinds of people... Presumably smart people (like us) and stupid people (like them)' It does partially carry its own cure: if you find it funny, you are one of them.


 In a sketch for any future completion of this metaphor, making use of what is at hand i.e. what I'm reading at the moment." Which currently is a short essay by Lewis Mumford named "Hume: Nihilistic Atomism [ Interpretations and forecasts: 1922-1972; studies in literature, history, biography, technics, and contemporary society]. Mumford is perplexed (intrigued really) by Hume's Enquiry on Human Understanding, Where Hume appears to have the the building block for all human motivation a certain irritability and reaction, writing that "A theory that eliminates value...smuggles it back in by making sensation...the seat of value." By the former notion of value Mumford means any manner of conventional ethics or virtue, even the activity and mediating influence of reason. But then he goes on to consider: "value comes into existence through mans primordial need to distinguish between life maintaining and life destroying processes." If a way of being establishes itself through sensation and experience on that basis perhaps a solid framework of value reestablished itself.

  I would have then a comedy of raw sensations, opposed to only a steady comedy of observation and mannerisms. And violence of first principles felt in barbs the over the thinness of gesellshaft culture where the greatest good is no more than the lack of authority.


11:24:05 PM    comment [];trackback [];


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