7
HUMOUR AND IRONY

Deleuze and Guattari

Against the elevation of the signifier and irony to a universal and inescapable principle, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have argued that the logic of the signifier and the idea of a necessarily imposed structure are strictly modern. Not only can we think of the emergence of signification, subjectivity and structure, we can also think beyond the logic of irony. Irony relies on the logic of the signifier: in order for a sign to mean it must have a lawfulness that transcends any specific speech act. It is not surprising that Gilles Deleuze’s book on sense and nonsense, The Logic of Sense ([1969] 1990), was preoccupied with irony. Both in The Logic of Sense and in his writings with Guattari, Deleuze tried to free sense from the system of language, by arguing that human signification and the production of a speaking ‘I’ are effects of a ‘milieu’ of sense which goes well beyond the system of speech. Before I utter a proposition, for example, I must have a perception of this world and a desire to act in this world; there are problems, perceptions, desires, or ‘planes’ of sense that enable some system of logic to emerge. Deleuze and Guattari insist that there was a history and a politics before the logic of the signifier, before the notion of a necessary system, structure, subjectivity or law to which ‘we’ are all necessarily submitted.

Deleuze frequently refers to humour, and occasionally satire, as a tendency opposed to irony:

The first way of overturning the law is ironic, where irony appears as an art of principles, of ascent towards the principles and of overturning principles. The second is humour, which is an art of consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls

(Deleuze 1994, 5)

Instead of thinking in terms of the concept as a law that governs what we say, humour and satire focus on the bodies, particularities, noises and disruptions that are in excess of the system and law of speech. The viewpoint of irony, or the viewpoint that surveys the totality of history as the history of ‘man’—the viewpoint that sees itself as a point within a single plane of history—is challenged by Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that universal man and the speaking subject are modern Western illusions.

Far from structuralism (the recognition of language as an impersonal system) being a radical break with the traditional politics of the subject, Deleuze and Guattari insist that structuralism is an intensification of the modern tendency to reduce the differences and events of politics to one homogeneous and tyrannical logic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 237). Against the ironic view of the subject as the bland empty effect of ‘the’ structure of signification, Deleuze insists on a humour and a poetics that—far from producing the before and after of a subject who then speaks—creates surfaces (Deleuze 1990, 7). Before there is the linear temporality of a subject who experiences the world in terms of a before and after, within one universal history, various planes have to be differentiated—such as the inside/outside of a mind and world, or the various borders and territories that define organisms and communities. Humour beyond irony, or what Deleuze refers to as superior irony (Deleuze 1994, 182), is the art of surfaces, the art of thinking the noises, sensations, affects and sensible singularities from which bodies are composed, bodies that can then have relations: ‘Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights’ (Deleuze 1990, 9). Against structuralism, which argues that an undifferentiated world is differentiated or carved up by the system of language, Deleuze insists on the singular pulsations of life, the capacity of life to become different, to destroy and prompt our concepts and categories. Any system is the effect of multiple and differentiating forces that create relations. Deleuze’s irony insists on multiplicity. Instead of there being a unity, Idea or ‘One’ that is belied by the chaotic or undifferentiated nature of life, Deleuze insists that life itself in all its infinite variety produces Ideas—singular differences—which our languages and systems can only begin to grasp:

Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is only the variety of multiplicity—in other words, difference. It is perhaps ironic to say that everything is multiplicity, even the one, even the many. However, irony itself is a multiplicity—or rather, the art of multiplicities: the art of grasping the Ideas and problems they incarnate in things, and of grasping things as incarnations, as cases of solution for the problems of Ideas.

(Deleuze 1994, 182)

Irony, traditionally, is temporal. It is through speaking that we have the sense of a subject who preceded speech and an original world that was there to be signified. We could only escape irony, and the point of view of the subject, if we could rethink this logic of time (and narrative). Deleuze and Guattari write a history of human culture which accounts for the emergence of the point of view of modern ironic ‘man’: the subject who is capable of thinking different cultures and epochs from his own human point of view. In order to have this ironic or detached notion of the subject, or the point of view that is always other than any particular quality, style or discourse, one has to produce a peculiar political and historical ‘plane’. The ‘subject’ and the signifier, and the very ideas of meaning, context and sense, are effects of bodily, historical and political forces. For Deleuze and Guattari, then, politics is not primarily a group of persons coming together in a common language and arriving at consensus and recognition. Before the politics of irony, where ‘we’ are all subjected to the same system, there is a micropolitics, where passions, forces, events and differences collide with no common ground. Before the community of man, and before the production of ‘a’ context of speakers, there are just productions and disruptions of differences, which are not the differences of language or system but are singular (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).

Humour, according to Deleuze, is this art of singularities, of events that are not meaningful, not structured according to a logic of before and after:

There is a difficult relation, which rejects the false Platonic duality of the essence and the example. This exercise, which consists in substituting designations, monstrations, consumptions, and pure destructions for significations, requires an odd inspiration—that one knows how to ‘descend’. What is required is humor, as opposed to the Socratic irony or to the technique of ascent.

(Deleuze 1990, 135)

Recall that Socratic irony was tied to the disjunction between what is true eternally and our contingent definitions: we can point to this or that instance of justice and beauty, but the Idea of justice or beauty exists above and beyond any of its single instances. For Plato, we could contemplate the Ideas of justice or beauty, but the Socratic dialogues suggest that we can only intimate or suggest such Ideas because our everyday definitions are inadequate. In contrast to those who claim to know or intuit ideas—the sophists who offer easy definitions—Socratic irony suggests that such ideas provide infinite ideals beyond everyday life, ideals towards which life can strive, but which can never be fulfilled.

The Romantics had seized on this negative dimension of irony and interpreted Socrates as nothing more than the performance of character. Instead of knowing the human soul and offering a theory of man, Socrates presented various personae that produced the soul as a power to act, rather than a thing to be observed. By being other than what he says Socrates is not a thing to be described by language so much as a demonstration of the creative power of language. Following the Romantics, de Man had insisted that the self or power behind language was an effect of the temporality of language. It is in the act of saying that a self who has spoken is produced. Irony strives to reflect on this necessary and fictional gap between a before and after of language. Any description of language as productive of the illusory real or ‘before’ that it seems to represent must itself rely on the temporality of language and narrative that it is trying to explain:

The reflective disjunction not only occurs by means of language as a privileged category, but it transfers the self out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language—a language that it finds in the world like one entity among others, but that remains unique in being the only entity by means of which it can differentiate itself from the world. Language thus conceived divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that become a sign in its attempt at differentiation and self-definition.

(de Man 1983, 213)

Against this ironic account of narrative and subjectivity as unavoidable, Gilles Deleuze argues both for a different—non-linear and multiple—understanding of time and for a ‘superior irony’ beyond the subject. De Man follows a long tradition of philosophers (since Kant) in arguing that time is not possible without a subjective point of view: the idea of a before and after requires the perception of a series of sequence of events. Time is subjective, the creation or synthesis of an ordered world from some stable viewpoint: ‘What all the figures of irony have in common is that they confine the singularity within the limits of the individual or the person’ (Deleuze 1990, 139).

Irony, according to Deleuze, is a tendency in thinking, a tendency to not rest with the world in all its flux of differences, a tendency to posit some ultimate point of view beyond difference. The problem with irony, from Deleuze’s point of view, is its elimination of all difference—its inability to admit what is beyond its point of view. And it is this ironic ascent that has dominated Western thinking: ‘Classical irony acts as the instance which assures the coextensiveness of being and of the individual within the world of representation’ (Deleuze 1990, 138).