Seven Red

So, continuing on in our long neglected series on the so-called Italian Ideology, I want to look at Paolo Virno’s discussion of the joke in Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Behind Negri, Virno is probably the closest of the old autonomist movement thinkers in terms of his recent publication in English speaking contexts. Several of his early pieces appear, of course, in the Autonomia volume originally published in 1982, but Michael Hardt’s influence in moving contemporary Italian thought into English translation has been massive. Virno co-edited, with Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, which appeared in 1996, and Virno’s subsequent little volume, A Grammar of the Multitude was at least widely remarked on when it appeared in 2004. Last summer, in addition to Marazzi’s Capital and Language, Semiotext(e) published Multitude: Between…, not to be confused with Hardt and Negri’s Multitude (the third volume of Hardt and Negri’s series, called Commonwealth, is due in October). So, obviously, Virno has been working on this concept of multitude as the form of the political, as well as a set of related concepts also addressed in Negri, like the common and kairos, so he could therefore be said to supplement the more popular work in the Empire line. Indeed, this is precisely how Virno’s work has functioned even among those clearly in tune with the Negri’s arguments (like Ronald Greene, for instance).

I’d suggest, however, that Virno is far more grounded in rhetorical and linguistic theory than Negri, which certainly makes the relative lack of interest in his work among American rhetoricians a little mystifying. The 1990’s-style tendency to hitch American rhetoric’s wagon to the latest European philosopher has been duly squelched of late by the neo-pragmatists, not to mention the monopolistic Burke industry. Stars and stripes forever. That’s probably a good thing, even if the baby often goes out with the eau-de-toilette. But I think Multitude: Between… makes some interesting moves that at least deserve a closer look, that-side-of-the-pond provenance notwithstanding.

On Preparing Witty Remarks

I was in the kitchen
Cookin’ up a shark
While Sally’s off preparing
Witty remarks witty remarks witty remarks
Witty witty witty

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Gimme Some Salt

Rather than take Multitude: Between… from the beginning, I want to drop in on a few themes. The connections between them will, with luck, start to emerge over the next few posts. Hopefully, I’ll also connect back to some issues that Virno focused on more in A Grammar…

So, first, witty remarks. The bulk of Multitude: Between… is taken up with Virno’s analysis of the joke as a privileged form of rhetorical innovation. When Virno discusses the joke, he is not referring to the planned routine, but the immediate witticism; he draws his examples from Freud’s Witz. It is the witty remark, almost always cited as a clever retort. Why is it privileged? For Virno, the witty remark serves as a diagram for innovative action more generally. It is a concentrated instance of linguistic innovation, the “sign that reproduces in miniature the structure and internal proportions of a certain phenomenon” (73). More specifically, the joke meets all the conditions for a particular form of public discourse. First, it requires the “third person.” More than just the producer and target of a witticism, the very structure of the joke needs an audience to verify that it has been pulled off successfully (I may have to get back to the deeply economic language of the analysis that leads Virno—through Freud—to this point; one also recalls the Levinas of Entre-Nous). So, the joke resembles he social structure of public discourse tout court; it’s like when the character in Thank You for Smoking tells his son during an argument over ice cream,  “I’m not trying to convince you; I’m trying to convince them,” pointing to a phantom audience. OK, but isn’t the joke simply a performative utterance, like many others analyzed by Austin? Certainly, but the joke is distinguished from other performatives because it is not “stereotypical and repetitive” (86). Whereas the marriage has a distinct set of repeatable conditions that would make the performative “I hereby declare you husband and wife” either felicitous or non-felicitous, the witty remark can happen anywhere and at any time; its conditions cannot be anticipated. You can’t prepare, as it were, witty remarks.

We might think of the famous “Jerk Store” episode of Seinfeld, for instance. George has been humiliated by a coworker in a meeting: as he gobbled down shrimp cocktail, the man said “The ocean called…they’re running out of shrimp.” For the remainder of the episode, George seeks revenge on the coworker, first coming up with a retort after the fact, then attempting to establish the conditions (which is to say, to control the rhetorical context) for the witticism: “The jerk store called, and they’re running out of you” (the retort’s decidedly unfunny character is part of the joke). After many complications—the colleague has moved on to a new job at Firestone, so George has to set up a meeting purportedly seeking to have a “tire day” at Yankee Stadium—George manages to get his retort off, only to have the former colleague immediately respond “That’s alright…you’re their all-time best-seller.” We see in the example a kind of negative version of the witticism that highlights its features: it requires the audience, it is seemingly spontaneous, and its contextual conditions are variable. One might say that there’s hardly a better concrete and everyday example of Nietzschean ressentiment than thinking of and dwelling on the clever retort after the moment for it has passed.

So, the witty remark is a special kind of performative. Its conditions cannot be anticipated. But isn’t this just rhetoric itself? Virno wants to distinguish the witty remark, and innovative action more generally, from other kinds of persuasive public discourse. To get there, he returns to Aristotle, and four concepts generally thought to constitute rhetorical action: phronesis, orthos logos, kairos, and endoxa. Needless to say, countless gallons of ink have been spilled on all these concepts in the rhetorical tradition. The first three generally relate to the way a speaker judges a situation or exigence and deploys a particular strategy. Phronesis usually gets defined as practical wisdom, though Virno explicitly dislikes this term, calling it pompous and preferring “practical shrewdness” (87, 90). It is the “ability to evaluate the appropriate thing to do within a contingent circumstace” (87). Orthos logos—or the correct application of a principle in language—exists in a “circular relationship” with phronesis, since the correct application and the principle itself end up being “impossible to distinguish” in the moment of use. Finally, kairos, or the opportune moment for an utterance or action. Very obviously, the witticism is the privileged site for understanding kairos. As the old joke goes: What’s the key to hu… “–timing–” …mor ? I’ve already noted elsewhere that Virno was investigating kairos as a specific function of the contemporary historical situation since his early work. The analysis of the joke in Multitude: Between… really supports that assertion: “The innovative action is an urgent action, accomplished under the pressure of unrepeatable circumstances. Those who accomplish it are always in a state of emergency” (92). (The invocation of the state of emergency cannot be detached from the political troubles in late 1970’s Italy, anymore than from the post-9/11 situation; the state of emergency becomes the norm, and along with it, kairos “returns” as the privileged category of rhetorical pedagogy).

Of course, none of this distinguishes the witticism from rhetoric as persuasive discourse thought more broadly. Virno draws the specific difference from the last Aristotelian term, the endoxa. Virno understands endoxa as “the opinions and beliefs shared by a community,” or “linguistic customs” (94). Traditionally speaking, the rhetor must consider endoxa as both the “presuppositions of every type of reasoning” and as a resource from which to draw in persuasive action. Every management guru now instructs—like our first-year writing teachers—that a successful speaker will “take his or her audience into account.” While the joke relies on endoxa, it uses the resource differently:

The persuasive discourse takes its ‘reasons from generally accepted opinions [endoxa]’ (Aristotle, Topica: 273). The joke, as has been noted, disrupts and delays the same endoxa from which it takes its form; or, at least, it extracts from the endoxa consequences so bizarre as to cause it to retroact, like a hammer, upon the very premises of the joke. Moreover, the persuasive discourse and the joke are comparable because both are characterized by an intrinsic conciseness. We understand that the rhetorical syllogism, the enthymeme, is essentially full of gaps, such that it omits a premise or even a conclusion [...] The same holds true, to a certain degree, for the joke, although one might add that the joke aims at sharing [...] the grave responsibility of refuting the endoxa (95-96).

Now, this point can easily be misread as a rather trite notion that the witticism aims for a departure from common beliefs rather than an adherence to them. In other words, it could be read as the same fear of crowds that has plagued rhetorical thought since its beginnings, and that is a virtual commonplace and pathetic paradox in liberal capitalism (everybody wants to be different, and etc.). If that’s all there was to it, it would be easily, and properly, discarded. But Virno’s point about endoxa is a little more complicated than that. It’s not merely that the joke “breaks away abruptly from the prevailing endoxa,” but that this departure “posits explicitly the theme of the contingence of all situations” (96-97). What distinguishes the witticism from “discourse meant to persuade” is that it doesn’t use background norms, common beliefs, or common ground as vehicles (for identification), but  works directly on the contingent and historical relationship between norms (as endoxa, or the “grammatical”) and life. The witticism exposes their point of juncture, “thus revealing the transformability of the contemporary form of life” (129).

Now, if all this talk about “life” is making some folks nervous, I can see why. Virno is most often accused – especially by Negri – of holding some particularly retrograde views of “human nature” as a substrate that underlies and supports praxis. Notice the following exchange, shortened here considerably, between Negri and Cesare Casarino:

NEGRI: As a way of clarifying our position further, let me contrast it with Paolo Virno’s recent work…Virno, in effect, ends up at once dehistoricizing and naturalizing the process I have described: he undermines the nonteleological historicity of the self-determination of singularities by asserting that the constitutive relations – including linguistic relations – that produce as well as bind these singularities together can be defined only in terms of a faculty. […for Virno] linguistic and social recomposition can only take place…on the basis of preexistent natural faculties, which follow specific laws. As far as I am concerned, this is a step backwards…we must keep in mind that whenever one naturalizes processes…one sooner or later ends up falling back into identity discourse.

CASARINO: …I am not sure I fully agree with your characterization of Virno’s position. On the one hand, I agree that in Virno the constitution of the common takes place on the basis of a faculty – even a natural faculty. On the other hand, I think the type of faculty he invokes cannot be construed as preexistent; in fact, in Virno this faculty cannot be said even to exist at all; on the contrary, this faculty is, strictly speaking, nonexistent, to the extent to which he defines it as pure potentiality immanent in the body. (In Praise of the Common, 127-128)

MY NOTE: There’s no doubt that Negri objects to this particular reliance on the ‘faculty of language’ in Virno; given Negri’s vociferous objections to Virno’s claim that Postfordism is the “communism of capital,” one suspects that the more pressing issue is whether or not the multitude drives the process of change under full subsumption (see, for example, The Porcelain Workshop, especially Lecture 4).

If the witticism disrupts the common beliefs of endoxa, on what basis does it do so? If the witticism draws us to “this side of the norm,” as Virno says, what is on this side? Virno’s answer may seem to support Negri’s objection. He says that beneath the very norms or rules (the endoxa) that the joke makes appear as contingent is “regularity,” or what he calls after Wittgenstein “the common behavior of mankind.” What? Wait! Oh, this is very much substituting one uber-norm for all the others! And worse, because it appears to do just what Negri says: it dehistoricizes and naturalizes. It’s worse as an uber-norm, because even the most demented reactionary must admit that endoxa are culturally specific (once exposed, of course, and this is presumably the current business model of rhetorical analysis). But this whole “common behavior of mankind,” now sunk in the very flesh of the human, assumes the status of a universal, indeed hiding its own historical character! Right? Well, this is the way we’ve been trained to respond in the humanities for quite some time, so it’s not surprising that even my margin notes, as I tried to read generously, say “Isn’t this just establishing another norm?” Virno’s answer to this question is quite complicated, and is probably the key advance of the book, so I want to reserve it for another post. Suffice it to say here that regularity, as “the common behavior of mankind” cannot be so easily dismissed with our own pomo endoxa, however cringeworthy the English rendering. Thus Virno: “Yet, it is necessary to be careful not to identify regularity with a super-rule” (119).

Rather than wade into the problem of distinguishing (and articulating) rule and regularity, I’ll finish up this discussion of the joke by addressing what Virno sees as the logic of witticisms, since he does a really interesting back-and-forth between Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations and Freud’s Witz. To sum the argument up too abruptly, Virno demonstrates that  Freud’s categories for witticisms match Aristotle’s taxonomy for faulty sophistic reasoning. The fallacy, as Virno says, is the “resource” for wit (again, we’ll have to return to the economic language and reasoning that drives these arguments). When this argument appears, you feel as if you could see it coming. If endoxa is made up, in part, of the presuppositions for reasoning, and the joke scrambles and exposes endoxa, then fallacious reasoning would seem to be the logical place to discern the logic of the joke. Virno is insistent that he is not suggesting innovation (if the joke is diagrammatic of innovative discourse) proceeds by “faulty and disconnected reasoning,” but rather that the fallacy is not an error when it is used as a resource for a joke (or any other innovation). Which is to say, it doesn’t have a truth value in the classical diction of language philosophy, and this of course meshes with the joke as a special performative. Once again, this argument rests on the particular relationship Virno invents between the rule and regularity. I’ll get to that next time. For now, I’ll close with the point:

I maintain that all jokes, as well as all endeavors to modify one’s form of life in a critical situation, are nourished either by the unusual combination of given elements or by an abrupt deviation toward ulterior elements, which are more or less in coherent with respect to the initial order of discourse. (145)

So, what we’ll have to do going forward. First, explicate the relationship between the rule and regularity: how is the “common behavior of mankind” not a super-rule? Second, and this may have to be the one shot at the monopoly (which invents ingenious explanations for how everything was already explained by its hero), I’d like to explain how Virno’s discussion of the pointed fallacy differs from common arguments about “perspective by incongruity.”

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