Untoward laughter and the micropolitical: social action, politics and the will after the sovereign subject

Abstract

From a commonsense perspective, an outburst of laughter appears to demonstrate little more than a lack of subjective will; it certainly does not register as having political significance. Yet, this is also to render the political in commonsense terms. As the emerging body of literature on the question of the micropolitical suggests, there is, beneath the essentially representational sphere of macropolitics, a micropolitics of affective force. In exploring the political potential of eruptions of laughter, I argue that grasping the novelty of the micropolitical requires that we shift debate away from the scalar questions of large and small, towards the distinction between the ordinary and the singular. Untoward laughter, by protracting the process through which affective force crosses a threshold of perception and becomes remarkable, draws attention to the micropolitics of everyday life. In pursuing this argument, first, I draw on the work of Helmuth Plessner to make a case for the fundamentally ‘undecidable’ nature of laughter: laughter expresses an ‘answer’ to an unanswerable situation. Yet, I argue that Plessner’s phenomenological explanation of laughter is insufficiently sensitive to the micropolitics of bodies, their affective and intensive transformations. Second, then, I draw on Nietzsche’s critique of the sovereignty of subjective will, arguing that the ‘I’ who laughs is merely the dominant drive among a series of conflicting drives. Finally, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold, to show that such drives are never ‘mine’. As untoward laughter demonstrates so clearly, the events of the world are always constituted through much more dynamic foldings of material and incorporeal forces.