Uncloaking Humour: Ironic-Parodic Sexism and Smart Media

Abstract

I want to offer a perverse position or provocation on humour. In the critical literature, this might simply amount to taking humour seriously. Within this framework, I would envisage myself to be an absurd figure, a po-faced philosopher of jokes and I would either go with that and tell a few or persist in the laughably hopeless quest for scholarly transcendence. However, my problem does not lie with an apparent contradiction that for me is no contradiction at all. Jokes have always been philosophical even if philosophy has always been divided over the meaning of jokes. (1) My issue is more contingent and strategic. It has to do with using humour against humour now, in contexts where the joke isn't funny and humour is, as Laura Bates suggests, merely a cloak for sexism and misogyny. (2) Of course, as a deeply social phenomenon, humour has always had a conservative, even reactionary role. There is nothing new about jokes that are discriminatory, regulatory and judgmental. That is why I find it slightly amusing when Michael Billig judges judgementalism the norm or when Simon Critchley declares discrimination inappropriate, undesirable and seeks to make a moral distinction between humour that is good and that which is bad. My position is that we cannot make such a distinction, that humour works to conserve and, conversely change habits, attitudes and relations and that it is precisely the undecidability of humour with respect to politics--reactionary or rebellious--that affords it strategic, political value as an antagonist. I want to extract an antagonistic feminist political theory of humour from a moralistic, philosophical tradition. First I should explain why I think this is necessary. If the concept of smart media is not itself an oxymoron--and actually it is more of a false claim, a legacy of the failure and resurrection of artificial intelligence in the form of a marketing strategy--then environments of smart media are, it seems to me, contemporary theatres of the absurd. (3) Presented in promotional videos by Corning, Microsoft or Google, such environments, both domestic and urban highlight the tragi-comic plight of people trapped in incomprehensible worlds, worlds that are at once hyper-sensory and senseless, irrational in their relentless pursuit of a rationale formed by the total, seamless fusion of corporate and computational values. The inhabitants of uninhabitable, inhospitable environments constituted by networked, distributed, ambient forms of intelligence embedded in mirrors, windows, walls and worktops are the emergent ideals of neoliberalism: transparent, efficient, managed, measurable and ultimately machinic. They embody what Bergson took to be laughable and what Beckett subjected to a mirthless, despairing laughter that was always reflexive, always bound to rebound on us, on the machines that are us; the laughers (1911; 1979). So here we are in our sanctioned, increasingly obligatory quest for self-knowledge through numbers--of farts: One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should hardly have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself. (Beckett 1979, pp29-30) I wouldn't want to call Beckett prescient, nor indeed Jacques Tati in his equally absurdist take on the futuristic homes (Mon Oncle, 1958) and cities (Play Time, 1967) of high modernism that are being redesigned and redesignated as smart. One of the features of absurdism, notable in the work of Beckett and Tati, is silence, a muteness derived from meaninglessness and communicative breakdown. Language becomes nonsensical and reason and argument dissolve into wordplay. As even the apologists for ambient intelligence and smart environments have been known to point out, nonsense and wordplay are among the more predictable outcomes of speech recognition technology that has yet to fulfil its promise--of being able to recognize speech. …