Ponowoczesność miała być erą ironii, która z góry rozbraja wszelką przemoc i usuwa ją z życia społecznego. Dziś jednak ironia jest narzędziem przemocy prawicowych fundamentalistów, którzy pod jej maską przemycają do głównego nurtu faszystowskie treści. Jak do tego doszło? W 55. rocznicę premiery „Latającego Cyrku Monty Pythona” Piotr Sadzik przygląda się śmiechowi i politycznej poprawności.
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There are few things as serious as laughter.
Still, it seems to be underestimated. One usually dissects important things by citing, preferably, some Dostoevsky, but no more - by watching Monty Python. And yet - remarks John Cleese, one of the Pythons - "just think about how many great dramatic films there are, and compare that to the number of great comedies." If the disproportion falls crushingly in favor of the former, it proves that "comedy is extraordinarily difficult. It is much, much harder than drama."
However, comedy is too often treated as mere fooling around. Meanwhile, it is, after all, in what we laugh at that not only reflects most brightly, considered serious, broader social problems, but it is in it that they condense.
For let's take a look at such irony, for example. It is, after all, not only a tool not badly supporting comedy, but also a figure of thought in which the nature of postmodernity is condensed. The gentleness of irony sawing all blades was supposed to be the basis of liberal democracy. In alliance with the neoliberal understanding of the market, it was to seal its global hegemony in a few years, building a "global village" in which life would flow to the beat of the universal dripping of wealth, in the bliss of the "end of history."
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/jak-emancypowaly-i-wypalaly-amerykanski-stand-up-i-brytyjski-humor/
Showing that there are no longer any final truths, and thus fostering diversity, irony was intended as an effective lightning rod to neutralize any extremity, cool the temperature of disputes and show that any problem can be talked through without jumping down each other's throats.
Irony, by definition doomed to duality, indicating the tension between what is said and the actual meaning of the statement, was suited to shatter the fundamentalism of unambiguity, to show that the world is not as it seems. Thus, it worked perfectly as a rebel weapon against social hypocrisy. It unmasked lofty platitudes, shattering their facade to reveal the violence hiding underneath. And in this era, violence was stigmatized in an effort to banish it from the space of public debate.
The proclamation of hateful views and attacks on minority groups, writes Andrzej Leder in There Was a ... Postmodernism, "provoked a very strong negative social reaction" and "led to the immediate marginalization of the author." It was irony that was supposed to make violence not only removed from social life, but even that it ceased to be possible.
However, things soon began to go wrong with irony.
This rhetorical ploy prevalent in the prose of American postmodernism - David Foster Wallace I invoke as an obvious witness - was taken over by the market. Self-referential, allusion-driven irony worked perfectly as the fuel of irreverence that drove desirable consumer behavior. In doing so, however, irony has been diluted and its critical fangs filed down.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/robert-gorski-kabareciarz-wyklety/
Want to undermine the market by pointing out the silliness of ads? Good luck with that! Nowhere has it been shown more strongly than in the ads themselves, which in the 1980s began to speak of their own harmfulness. The result? Sales of the product from the mock ads increased, and many times over.
And the more lasting effect? Since the most merciless criticism of the market is made by the market itself, which not only blandly violates its power, but strengthens its reign, it also means that it is no longer possible to take a critical stance against it. Behold, the market, like the passages and dreams in Walter Benjamin, has "lacked an outside."
Irony, wonderful as a tool of resistance to authority, has turned out to be terrible as a tool of the existing order. Irony is fulfilled only in its negative function, acting in punctuation, in interludes, as an unmasking critical force, an exception that, when it becomes the rule, turns into hell. Necessary for rebels exposing the hypocrisy of authority, irony used to defend the existing order proved to be a weapon pacifying any protest, nay, neutralizing any rebellion in advance. "The oppressiveness of institutionalized irony" (Wallace) thus tyrannizes us because it creates a situation with no way out.
Still, it seemed that exitlessness here applied to the post-political, as assumed, market. Things became further complicated, however.
Liberal ironist and fascist ironist
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In the era of liberal democracy's triumphs, its opponents went off the deep end, occupying the margins of political life. Initially, they slandered postmodernity, accusing it of relativism, moral dislocation and moral degeneration.
Under conditions of constant retreat, anti-liberal forces had to reinvent themselves, undergo rebranding. A ready-made solution lay at hand. Since it was irony that guaranteed non-turning power, fundamentalists began to disguise themselves as ironists. It turned out that postmodernity not only created the conditions for them to act, but even that it rewarded them. The right wing hacked postmodernity, thundering its founders with their own weapons.
Thus, since fascism was socially taboo, ironic humor began to serve as a mask that allowed the content of fascism completely un-ironic, to be smuggled into the mainstream. As Alexander Reid Ross, author of Against the Fascist Creep, puts it: "humor or irony has become one way of shifting one's affective position without retreating from any ideological positions." The Alt-right (which subsequently found imitators in the equally anti-liberal alt-left) made irony a weapon for disseminating violent content. Here, irony serves - this is Angela Nagle, author of the book Kill All Normies devoted to the alt-right - "to undermine confidence in its critics."
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/czytaj-dalej/majmurek-jak-tumblr-lewica-przegrala-z-south-park-prawica/
The meaningful pivot of irony thus made it possible to mask hatred. Since "it's impossible to catch an ironist" (Wallace again), hands raised during a hajj can be explained away as a gesture for ordering beer, the swastika can be seen as an Old Indian symbol of good luck, the extinguishing of Hanukkah candles with a fire extinguisher a performance, and the invasion can be carried out while pretending to be a pacifist. After all, "such uniforms can be bought in any store." It is no coincidence that this perfectly ironic sentence was uttered by a genocidalist.
If today's anti-liberal internationalism finds its source, ideological and often financial, in the Kremlin, it is precisely because Russia has become under Putin's rule a fulfilled nightmare for ironiosceptics - an imperium of postmodern fascism. With the hands of Dugin and other machers of collective manipulation, it has made a malicious capture of what seemed to be the most "progressive" thought of the Western campuses of the last half-century, in order to use it against the hated West as the guarantor of the existence of a demoliberal minimum of respect for the individual.
Humor here, however, is not just for camouflage. This fascism 2.0, fascism in new digital decorations, has reached for it as one of the main tools of political struggle. Laughter has become a bludgeon to strike at opponents. In the trolling born under these conditions, taunting, humiliation and "plowing" proved to be a weapon of mass destruction.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/dlaczego-zachod-nie-chce-przyznac-ze-putinowska-rosja-jest-faszystowska/
Zamordyism today has the face of a smirk of trolling complacency or a retch at the humiliation of others, which are far from the old grim conservative condemnation of laughter. The fascist ironist, however, is obviously not its demoliberal predecessor. Today's fascism uses irony as a handy tool to achieve entirely non-ironic, fundamentalist goals. Fascists reach for irony at the stage of covert anti-liberal diversion, when it is necessary to mask a hateful message by pretending that its meaning is different. However, they use laughter as a brutal way to humiliate and disqualify their opponents at the stage of open confrontation. The drive of modern fascism consists of these two engines.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/historia/radykalna-prawica-wybielanie-nazizmu-twitter/
Of course, when it is convenient for her, the modern right is as non-ironically outraged as possible. Like when her religious feelings are offended by an alleged parody of the Last Supper. The right can also laugh at a political competitor (#laughingkamala is a hashtag eagerly reproduced by Trumpists). And in this, however, the new rightists are ironic. The dual mechanism of irony allows them to always take the opposite position to their opponent, even if the price for this would be to contradict their own earlier statements or be accused of inconsistent views. In the space of irony, such an accusation becomes, by definition, ineffective.
Irony and violence - polar opposite phenomena, as it seemed, whose orbits were never supposed to intersect, here began to support each other. We found ourselves trapped. "Liberal ironist", which, according to Richard Rorty, each of us was supposed to become, was replaced by a figure that until now would have been considered an eccentric oxymoron. The "fascist ironist" became the patron saint of the new times.
An unexpected swap of places
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Above all, however, the left-liberal camp and its opponents have swapped places. As Przemyslaw Czaplinski rightly noted already a few years ago, liberals, seeing their hegemony crumbling, began to call for the restoration of the truth they had previously relativized, pointing to the Constitution or civil rights as the "absolute point of support."
So while the autocratic zamordists became subversive postmodernists, their opponents became "fundamentalists of liberal democracy." And as fundamentalists, they could no longer afford irony: "they don't shy away from jokes about power, but they can't use irony aimed at institutions they considered absolute." The demoliberal camp has become principled, while its opponents have turned to subversive permissivism, within which anything can potentially be laughed at. Of course, they too have their principled agenda, but they pursue it through irony.
The spell of rebellion that gave appeal to the demoliberal offer, more or less since the 1960s bringing emancipatory and progressive changes in Western culture, has been taken over by the right. Speaking out against the dogmas of liberal democracy, the right was henceforth able to conduct its activities under the banner of unabashed dissent from the prevailing system, where transgressing its limits began to be portrayed as practicing freedom: "that's not correct? And why wouldn't we say that?"
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Fascism, excluded outside the framework of what is accepted in the space of public debate, was now laced with the charm of "incorrectness," it was even its obfuscation that guaranteed its rebel charisma. It was through humor that exclusionary language became attractive. Also because, by giving vent to hitherto stifled urges, it guaranteed a return in the form of a sense of pleasure.
So did the progressive camp before. The demoliberal consensus that has triumphed in the West in the postmodern era was, after all, born on a wave of opposition to the world of the old prohibitions. However, the rights it has won must now also be defended by prohibitions: "you can't say that, because it offends others." Meanwhile, any culture of prohibition finds itself in trouble in the face of the awakened power of urges.
The snag is that in order to guarantee the protection of historically disadvantaged minorities in whose emancipation it participated, liberal democracy had to develop systemic safeguards for them. In order to save the civilizational minimum, we need to establish boundaries, such as regulating freedom of expression so that it does not turn into hate speech, and, above all, believing "seriously" in human rights and the package of individual freedoms. One side effect, however, has also been to place persecuted groups outside the realm of critical satire. Humor, which used to be widely regarded as an expression of progressive subversiveness, was now, precisely in the name of progressive slogans, sought to be tempered in the public space.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/spiecie-cancel-culture-kontakt-falszywe-wyobrazenia-o-realnej-krzywdzie/
Despite all the ethical rightness of this gesture, as long as we fight against the morordism only with a reactive ban, and not also with a redirection of the urge energies that drive it, we are doomed to failure. It is from systemic prohibition that this content derives its perverse power. So as long as we only position ourselves as defenders of liberal democracy, we allow its enemies to go on the offensive.
If bans don't work, it's because modern fascism is the child of postmodern permissivism, which has made no ban definitively effective anymore. In such a framework of political contention, only ethical rightness never wins, it needs the support of its own attractiveness. Postmodernity first gave the progressive camp an advantage, but ultimately created the rules of the game in which its enemies win. Permissivism, which years ago fueled the march of progress, bringing emancipatory changes that formed the minimum package of liberal democracy, now, as a carrier of exclusionary content, became the fuel of the zamordist counterrevolution that buried its hegemony. The explosive mixture of modern culture is created by this inextricable intertwining of permissiveness (no prohibition is unassailable) and narcissism: since societies have ceased to accept any discipline, they demand an eternal wish concert - they want to listen only to content that will confirm them in complacency.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/narcyzm-narodowy-autorytaryzm-i-potrzeba-destrukcji-golec-de-zavala/
For this reason, one would have to think differently about the spatiality of humor. As long as we ask where the limit of what can be made fun of lies, we always give fascism a win. Today's nihilistic version of it will draw strength from crossing every boundary it encounters. The popularity of obscene leaders like Trump is convincing of this. It is therefore necessary to consider rather what kind of community we want to build through laughter. We need to think about laughter that is politically and socially critical, yet effective. Meanwhile, we live today in a space, supposedly subject to the logic of all-entertainment, in which genuine, critical laughter is scarce. However, if politics turns out to be not so much a conflict of ideas as a game in which drive always wins in the end - that is, that which attracts and promises pleasant gratification - countering it with prohibitions, ascetic moralizing and coarse seriousness is the shortest recipe for disaster.
The Comedy Witch Hunt
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Today, the epicenter of such puritanical rigor has become primarily the left under the sign of "wokeness." It is she who has driven the source-valuable tools of so-called political correctness to absurdity. Meanwhile, as evidenced, for example, by reactions to Dorota Maslowska's recent statements, , the left-liberal camp still too often opts for a negationism that is as convenient as it is suicidal. It denies the notion of "politically correctness" any descriptive value, arguing that the very use of it is already a duplication of the right-wing narrative.
It is worth remembering that before (e.g., in Allan Bloom) it became a pejorative term aimed from the outside at the left-liberal camp, it was used within it as a mockery of those of its representatives who slavishly adhered to the rigidity of ideological orthodoxy. Thus, it does not need to be a category-bag of the kind of "cultural Marxism" in which the right will find Che Guevara next to Donald Tusk, in order to invalidate the differences between opponents and make the task of attacking them wholesale easier.
Instead of pretending the problem doesn't exist, it's worth confronting it. Such an advocate of non-white criticism of "political correctness" today is Slavoj Žižek. And Žižek states the point forcefully: political correctness is a moral terror that, while posing as a fight against discrimination, makes it impossible to transcend. Cleese echoes him: "political correctness was a good idea at its inception, but then it turned into an absurdity." Political correctness as a tool of just compensation for historically persecuted groups and a shield against their further exclusion, has undergone a perverse mutation within the "woke" culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM
As Žižek writes in his most recent book, a crushing critique of the phenomenon, injustice here has become "secularized religious dogma." In this way, the "politically correct left" builds a narcissistic identity around a sense of hurt. And in the narcissism of small differences inherent in "Wokeism," even the slightest deviation from the accepted line of correctness (e.g., the use of a word not quite adapted to the new sensibility), takes on the characteristics of a monstrous and unforgivable offense that can be considered hurtful.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/slavoj-zizek-jordan-peterson-rosja-ukraina/
But since humor can hurt in principle (since anything can become its target), "wokeness" as (again Žižek) an "extremely authoritarian" movement of "puritanical fundamentalists" that participates in "new forms of barbarism" must strike at the very foundations of comedy.
The classics of the genre point this out. Barely a few months ago Jerry Seinfeld, in a interview for The New Yorker, said that under the influence of fetishized "political correctness" people are so afraid of offending others that "it's the end of comedy." In a similar vein, his colleague from years ago, Larry David, spoke: "we have our fans who don't expect us to be politically correct, [...] they don't care about wokeness. They want laughter and won't be offended by it."
Immediately voices were raised in wonderment at the comedians, that how so, after all, they themselves have always been supposedly perfectly correct. The thing is that they never looked at the rules of correctness. Left-wing columnist, Ben Burgis, devoted an entire book to a critique of "canceling comedians while the world burns" (Canceling Comedians While the World Burns. A Critique of the Contemporary Left), dedicating it to those in his own camp who seek to create "a smarter, funnier [...] version of the Left." Symptomatic that Monty Python (this fall will mark 55 years since its debut on British television) once censored by conservative bigots ("so funny it's banned in Norway" - proclaimed the slogan coined by the group to promote "The Life of Brian"), is now becoming the target of criticism from progressives on the Switchboard. Shane Allen, employed by the BBC as Comedy Controller (a name worthy of an appearance in Monty Python) has ruled that the Pythons' current program would not work, as the six white Oxford and Cambridge graduates do not reflect the diversity of today's world very well.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/slavoj-zizek-jordan-peterson-rosja-ukraina/
On Twitter, Cleese immediately responded to him with a hilarious post that was itself a performance of provocatively incorrect liberty: "That's not fair! We were incredibly diverse. FOR OUR TIME. Three of us graduated from public schools, one was a fag, and well, Gilliam, though not actually black, was a yank. And no slave owners." Incorrect? Žižek calls politically correctness taken to the extreme "a form of self-discipline" that, being careful to use the wrong word, upholds exclusion as an indelible reference point.
Of course, it's a good thing that we're discussing comedy today in a changed landscape. A joke with a demeaning sexist or racist intent is today considered a comically devoid embarrassment far more often than it was just a short while ago (the recent Free Jokes exhibition at the Museum of Caricature, dedicated to presenting the humor of Poland's transformation, is excellent evidence of this). Because, clearly, jokes can be extremely oppressive. And of course, there is a need for some form of legal regulation of hate speech, for which disguise so often guarantees hurtful humor today. But the flexibility of ethical judgment, which depends on each individual situation, must not be lost in the process.
Our today's and tomorrow's problem, wrote the cited Czaplinski a few years ago, is expressed "in the question of whether it is possible to have irony and absolute at the same time, and thus the right to undermine all truths and inviolable value." This means, however," he added after a while, "that both the absolute and irony must appear in another version. Here is a dilemma that requires the skill of Baron Münchhausen: how to have humor that is a risk, that does not have to bite its tongue for fear of offending someone, and that thus retains its subversive power, and at the same time does not exclude, does not become a bludgeon of identity hatchet men showing contempt and superiority through it? How then to have the freedom to laugh and respect the individual? How, then, not to give way to the swollen sectarianism of the new Puritanism, while at the same time not entering the ruts of alt-right aggravation?
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/anty-woke-bigoteria-i-fanatyzm-prawicy/
Today's zamordists are just having fun. Our job is to spoil their fun. In no way, however, will this succeed through ascetic seriousness. So will appeals to literalism and straightforward sincerity in the face of irony - that would be an expression of capitulation. What we urgently need is to come up with a non-right-wing critique of politically correctness. Otherwise, it will be the right-wing camp that will politically discount its helplessly restrained drives. To take away the right's monopoly on effective laughter is therefore a matter of quite literally meaning life and death. Until this task is accomplished, no lasting political change will be possible.
Although we are far from laughter today, it is on the side of laughter that remedies could be sought: "In the face of the unbearable," wrote French philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle, "there is still the possibility of laughter." This is not an escapist downplaying of the danger. On the contrary: uncorking from the slammer, laughter seeks "ways beyond the tyranny of reality." Therefore, laughter "is a fear-inspiring weapon," and it is "a weapon against all authorities." With an abrupt volte-face, it makes it possible to transform a maximum threat into an equally maximum opportunity, "turning horror into gentleness, prohibition into a pass."
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What we need today is humor that is offensive, brazenly non-puritanical, refreshingly obscene, freely blunt, on the antipodes to all narcissistic irritability, whether right-wing or woke. We need laughter against irony, but also laughter against violent ridicule, the expression of which today is becoming the contemptuous retching of trolls. Both of these so different forms of ridicule, moreover, have a common denominator. They build identity narcissism of well-being.
Anyone who aims to "plow into" an opponent is satisfied with his own identity, which he defines by contrast to the objects of his hatred. Both those who, when it's convenient for them, shout that no limits can be placed on freedom of expression even when that expression carries overt hatred, and those who see violence in every micromanagement of their own comfort, are emanations of narcissistic identity politics. Locked into their beliefs, they "know" that "refugees are coming for welfare," "strangers are taking our jobs," and "boomers are using violent language." This is the language of certainty. There is no room for any surprises here.
Meanwhile, only from the cracks in the dogmatically homogeneous picture of the world can glimpses of its more sensible form hatch. So if the narcissism that latches onto rigid identities is responsible for today's political tragedy, we urgently need today to transcend its power. For this, laughter is suitable by definition.
Universalism of laughter
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Laughter manifests itself in the form of an outburst, that over which we lose control. "It makes a breakout," as Dufourmantelle beautifully writes, "in the daily weave of days." It takes us by surprise, when suddenly, for a second, things arrange themselves under our gaze in an unexpected configuration, and our usual behavior breaks, giving place to convulsions of the laughing body. Laughter deprives us of control, so it exposes us to risk, to the chance of victory and the threat of defeat at the same time. And this security is unanimously desired by representatives of various identity politics. They thus seek an asylum in which perfect sterility prevails. Nothing from the outside will enter the field of vision here anymore, so that abstract ethnic, racial or ideological purity can be distilled, which will be hounded by a self-absorbed identity.
Instead of labeling identity with labels, what we need is a confusion, a sense of non-identity, of the kind originally conveyed by the "queer" movement. Jack Halberstam, one of the classics of queer studies, speaking out against the logic of "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces," it is Monty Python's lying on the antipodes to "woke" that he chooses as an ally today. In doing so, he reminds us that the camp aesthetic (as well as the term "queer" itself, being a kind of "subversive, twisted joke") was a strategy of resistance in which humor served as a tool of struggle. For this reason, "taken to the extreme, political correctness" leads to self-sabotage. It deprives us of a weapon when confronting coups, whose effectiveness is based precisely on the skillful use of ridicule.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/polemika-urszula-kuczynska-transfobia-kultura-uniewazniania/
When Cleese demands that no one be excluded from the grossness of laughter, objections could of course be raised. If some discriminated group finds the jokes in question hurtful, we cannot question that feeling, at least until it is also treated equally outside of comedy. Such a caveat, however ethically sound, fails to take into account that in an era in which the only overriding rationale has become that of harm (Leder), the sense of being an oppressed minority is also expressed by those who retain symbolic hegemony: whites persecuted by the appearance of a black actor in the film, men horrified by demands for equal opportunities for different genders, or the Polish Church, overwhelmingly shaping the local reality, yet convinced that injustices are being done to it that Christians last experienced at least in the time of Nero.
Cleese's position could be defended from another angle. To see in it a certain idealistic demand, a vision of laughter coming from a utopian future. One in which everyone can be laughed at without exception, because the joke speaks within a certain universal order. It is a vision of equalizing everyone with laughter. Not coincidentally, in his latest book Žižek shows that the common denominator of today's right-wing international and the "woke" movement is a fixation on the singularity of one's identity particularity. Meanwhile, emancipation is only possible under the banner of universalism. Not a universalism as a dumbing down of diversity into a unifying synthesis, but one in which each of us will be different, yet bound by a common sense of non-identity. Narcissistic attachment to one's own identity, in turn, pulverizes the movement for meaningful political change. Therefore, reinventing universalism is the most urgent political task of our modern age.
It is laughter that could help achieve it. Laughter that makes fun of everyone, but it is not doing harm that is the intention of the laughing person, who also does not feel harmed by laughter. It is about a joke that does not permanently assign a demeaning trait as natural to a particular group of people, but which, from the middle of the awareness that no such natural traits exist, assumes that all of us, though different, are equal. This is how Žižek's critique of politically correctness differs from that of the various Jordan Petersons. Its basis is universalism understood as a community of differences that no longer serves natural hierarchies, the belief that one race, gender or religion is better than another. It is a community in which we all laugh violently at each other, but only because none of the laughers wants to take a dominant position. In a way, the ridicule itself becomes the laughing stock here.
About such salutary extraction of laughter from under the fetish of being wronged, Cleese says: "every year at the United Nations they should vote to choose one nation to be the target of jokes." He is echoed by Žižek. In doing so, he suggests a wonderful picture of a fulfilled utopia, in which ridicule no longer merely offends, but serves understanding. The Slovenian recounts how, in the former Yugoslavia, he met representatives of the other nations that made up that state, Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats. They all told cheeky jokes about each other. But not against each other. We made competitions," Žižek says, "in who would tell a better joke about ourselves. "these were obscene racist jokes, but the result was a wonderful sense of solidarity of shared obscenity."
The ridicule, which had hitherto been a relationship-breaking tool of violence, turns into a proper knot of actual friendship - possible only at the price of "exchanging friendly obscenities." This, Žižek continues, is what is most lacking in "political correctness" - real contact between non-narcissistic "selves." The way to establish it would no longer be to ask about the specific qualities that make up the identity of our interlocutor, but to demand a deviation from one's own identity: "tell me a pig joke about yourself, and we'll be friends." It is necessary to "create an atmosphere for practicing jokes in such a way that they provide that bit of obscenity that establishes true closeness."
The alternative is to entrench ourselves in perpetually wronged and resentful rigid identities, in which "wokeness" would not be much different from the various right-wing redoubts of good name. Thus, without a friendly exchange of insults, we will forever remain locked in a politics whose horizon is defined by the enemy.
Of course, in a few years, the nations whose representatives so collectively made fun of each other would be at each other's throats, carrying out mass genocides. And yet, although the obscenity of laughter did not prevent the crime, it is probably not worth abandoning its potential, targeting the deactivation of violence. Of course, the vision from Žižek is a picture of a community that is impossible to form in the current antagonized social conditions. And yet, at the same time, these conditions will never change unless we are summoned by the target ideal expressed in this vision, which could already transform current social relations in advance.
The Glory of Risk
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The raft of our political salvation, then, is to take risks. Laughter, on the other hand, is by definition a great - in keeping with the title of Dufourmantelle's beautiful book - praise of risk, not only because everything can be made the object of a joke and there is no sanctity to it, but also because in laughter we break free from the restraining corset of consciousness, a force we cannot control takes control of our bodies.
Today we associate risk negatively, as that which we want to eliminate. If it is taken, it is, as in business, as a controlled risk, when we only move with an action when the accounts show that it will pay off for us. So we associate risk with trauma, against which we want to protect ourselves in advance. However, if we look out for a happiness-giving surprise, and thus an improvement in our situation, we must first risk exposing ourselves to the unforeseen, which is out of our control.
This is why Dufourmantelle writes about "positive trauma," an event that invades our boundaries and over which we cannot control, but only through the hole it gouges in our autonomy do we gain the ability to get out of our currently unhappy status quo. As Agata Bielinska shows, the way out is not a pre-emptive blow to protect ourselves from the wound, but "a vulnerability to injury that goes beyond the logic of the victim and does not demand compensation in the form of communal consolation or another rigid identity."
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/nauka/psychologia/pozytywna-trauma-milosci/
To paraphrase Eva Illouz, one might ask: "why does humor hurt?" to answer that, by definition, it is impossible to eliminate from it the possibility of transformation into harming evil. In humor, the possibility that we will someday be hurt must remain open in order for humor to also be able to destroy that which hurts. Only by not being able to protect ourselves from its effects can we provide it with subversive power. And it is it that one desires to cushion when labeling individual phenomena, packing reality into handy containers labeled "trigger warning."
Identity Politics in general attempts to "cobble the world into rubrics" so that it does not derail "into the unforeseen, the adventurous and the downright incalculable" (Schulz). The result is a staticness that derails the possibility of change. In a world tarnished by labels that do not allow for the indeterminacy that breaks out of them, only salvaging what cannot be categorized can therefore save us. Nothing points the way toward this so well as laughter. "Laughter" - states Cleese, as if echoing Dufourmantelle - "contains an element of surprise, something about the human condition that you hadn't noticed before." Certainty precludes laughter. Things we already know should not make us laugh, because "they are not revelations." True comedy is therefore an invaluable cognitive tool. It allows the revelation of those dimensions of reality of which we were previously unaware.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/klasizm-z-polityka-tozsamosci-moll/
"Aristotle," proclaimed William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a novel about the search for the lost book II of Poetics dedicated to comedy, "considers the tendency to laugh as a good force that can also have a cognitive value, [...] it forces us to look better and makes us say: so it was really like this, and I didn't know it." Critical comedy relies on the unexpected ("No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"). For this reason, it does not cement the well-being of the laughers, but each time it reveals cracks in our knowledge, revealing something new to us, taking us beyond ourselves.
It's not the lickety-split comity that sleazy cabaret performers strike up with their audiences, giving them the pleasure of collectively shrugging off others. So it's also not the throwing around of "incorrect" words, which the anti-woke right takes as proof of its own unruliness, and which in its predictability and dull schematism has nothing to do with comedy. Critical laughter, not superiority retching - this despairing resentment-fueled heist is born of surprise. Which also means that true comedy is a revelation, or no comedy at all, revealing to us for a second something unknown. As the invoked Burgis wrote: good comedy works by "making us laugh at things we usually think of as extremely unfunny, just as good literature often makes us identify with characters with whom we disagree in real life." In the literal sense of the word, comedy must be revelatory (in the sense of the Latin "revelatio" meaning "revelation"): laughter teaches openness to "the unprecedented," which we so desperately need politically. "To risk life is not to die while alive," Dufourmantelle put it firmly. One can probably trust her, especially when such words were spoken by someone who threw himself into the water, where, in saving someone else's drowning child, he paid for it with his life.
In 1984, which instead of fulfilling Orwell's vision saw the zenith of postmodernism's success, Neil Postman in To Amuse Ourselves to Death asked how to save the public debate devoured by entertainment. He gave two answers, "one of which is preposterous and can be dismissed immediately; the other is desperate, but the only one we have." In our radically changed situation, perhaps the preposterous one is the only one we have. The "desperate" option, in which Postman saw hope, is the disappointing belief that the world will be saved by our schools, where the awakening of civic techno-consciousness should begin. The profound helplessness of this solution comes if only from the fact that it ignores how our knowledge systems and the institutions that hinge on them have themselves been blown away by the storm of the digital revolution.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/klamstwa-za-darmo-prawda-za-paywallem-robinson/
The second option, according to Postman, would be to do TV shows (and let's substitute the Internet, social media and other media spaces as we know them today) "whose intention would not be to get people to turn off" the devices, but to show how the images they display should be viewed, revealing how they distort our public debate. Such activities would "necessarily take the form of parodies," close, Postman adds, to Monty Python, whose goal would be to elicit "a rubbishy laugh at the control" that media images "exert over public discourse."
In fact, entire episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus took the form of exaggerated imitations of programs from the BBC's schedule of news services, sports news, weather forecasts, political discussions, interviews and teleseminars. Cleese once recalled how, after watching a Pythons program, viewers watching the rest of the BBC's schedule would burst out laughing again and again, completely unable to take seriously what they were watching. Underneath the "serious" programs, they could already see the idiotic mechanism recognized through the Python imitation. A loose anecdote here smuggles in a vision of delight. A vision of redemptive vision correction.
If the media spectacle derives its power from the fact that we take the images presented in it as "natural," python skits strip away this illusion. They make the viewer realize that everything has been constructed in a certain way. And if it is, it means that it can be constructed quite differently. In the satirical exaggeration, the hidden dimensions of reality are highlighted. The social game, along with the hitherto invisible machinery of ideology, is revealed as a game. Once the Python lenses are mounted, established conventions, behavioral patterns and mores, all hierarchies, arrangements and social roles turn out to make exactly as much sense as, sticking to the Python yard, an expedition to both peaks of Kilimanjaro when the other does not exist, an attempt to jump over the English Channel using the long jump method, or a name so long that it becomes the cause of death for its utterer. Under such conditions, it is difficult to pump up any identity narcissistically.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/kryzys-klimatyczny-skrajna-prawica-faszyzm-bledne-kolo/
And wouldn't the measure of promising indeterminacy in an age that wants to label every identity, so that the product so labeled can then be consumed, be precisely the unconcealedness of unformed laughter? It was this need to fall outside the dictionaries that group member Terry Jones argued with great Pythonian perversity: "One of the things we wanted to achieve with our program was to try to make something so unpredictable that it would have no shape and you could never even tell what kind of humor it was. And I think the fact that the word 'pythonish' is now a word present in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed."
That is the failure we should risk today.
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Piotr Sadzik - deals with the philosophy of literature, lecturer at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the UW, as a literary critic associated with Dwutygodnik. Juror of the Literary Award of the City of Warsaw. Author of the book Regions of Single Heresies. Maran exits in Polish prose of the 20th century (nomination for the Gdynia 2023 Literary Award in the Essay category). Co-editor of Derrida's Ghost (with Agata Bielik-Robson), among others. He is preparing a book on states of emergency in Gombrowicz's writing. At the Franz Kafka University of Muri, he heads the Bracket Chair.
