Risibility and nitrous oxide

RISIBILITY and nitrous oxide

To be Humorless is to be inhuman
Aristotle


The Laughing Gas Effect and Current Events


Part I. It's all a joke -- don't look for a rational explanation

Freud on Psychic Locality
(the connection between contents of consciousness and localized anatomical process)


The idea which is thus put before us is one of psychic locality. We shall wholly ignore the fact that the psychic apparatus concerned is known to us also as an anatomical preparation, and we shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine the psychic locality in any anatomical sense. We shall remain on psychological ground, and we shall do no more than accept the invitation to think of the instrument which serves the psychic activities much as we think of a compound microscope, a photographic camera, or other apparatus. The psychic locality, then, corresponds to a place within such an apparatus in which one of the preliminary phases of the image comes into existence. As is well known, there are in the microscope and the telescope such ideal localities or planes, in which no tangible portion of the apparatus is located. I think it superfluous to apologize for the imperfections of this and all similar figures. These comparisons are designed only to assist us in our attempt to make intelligible the complication of the psychic performance by dissecting it and referring the individual performances to the individual components of the apparatus. So far as I am aware, no attempt has yet been made to divine the construction of the psychic instrument by means of such dissection.



Part II. But What Is a Joke? (if you're not just jokin')

The Psychosemiotic Quadrants of Sign-Use takes up where this left off. Using Freud's model to reconstruct dream connections in discourse.

1. The epistemic principle: psychology from the side of consciousness. The content given through the lense-eye-apparatus (or hearing-ear-apparatus, etc,) is a. simple (not complex, as in divisible into parts: as qualities wholly present) b. nameable, recallable and communicated; c. cognitively related

2. The Overall effect of current MSM content flowing through the collective//group psyches (not quite the same thing, but...),.... when replayed in consciousness through signs S* at the 7 StopInders of the completing totality (of individual consciousness under sign-use) .... becomes comedic, 'funny', clownish, laughable.

What is experienced, like a mirage on hot pavement, can be grammatically construed as a "property", or "attribute" of the event occasioning the reaction. (the mirage looks like it is 'on' the shimmering surface; 'the pavement looked like glass'. This reaction has been taken up to contents of the thinking center. It is undeniably a reaction to something 'objective' that comes off, through the signs to us, and can have psychosomatic effects. I am talking about cable TV news that makes people who watch it sick. That describes both its phenomenology and its epistemic status.

I offer the following as examples:

1. The picture of George Burns as God, welcoming Bish and Cheney at Heaven's Gate... Juxtaposition of 'Just the thing to carry your conscience in" headline grabber from NYTimes favorite list 7.18.70
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/dining/18bags.html?em&ex=1184904000&en=509fb1e485bf0c57&ei=5087%0A
, and the Cosmic symbol of Remorse of Conscience, Christ's Cross (=>Revulsion-Recoil of direct emanations of the Holy Sun Absolute at what nankind had become/is ...in tucked into special pricey bags sewed up for the purpose. (This would be a Freudian displacement; Remorse of conscience disturb you? -- rummage around among the gefultefish.)


2 The Elephant and the Donkey (masking a deeper ultimate archetypal splitting) pulling "all-nighters" in the US Senate: reported in two ways for whose lead you follow)
NYSlimes: Democrats Lack Support to Force Vote on Pullout http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/washington/18cnd-cong.html?ex=1342411200&en=6b31b7414e57409a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

or Republicans block vote on troop withdrawal http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3390227
..calling attention to the contrasting grammar: NYCity more Jewish based grammar depicts the Dems "lacking support", "failing to stop", "lacking force" -- women, like Cindy Sheehan, who couldn't give a fuck about real soldier's woes. .... The ABC headline puts the grammar where the game is. These are America's Men, standing firm against seductions to bed with the enemy. Christian soldiers defending the Jews.

You have to be in a certain mood to appreciate this as humor -- gallows

3. "America", through its official spokespersons in the Middle East, used in discourse in connection with moral language, such as "human rights". Again, is that hilarious? or what.

4. The image of a philosophical trajectory leading from DO => Socrates (as in Plato) internalizing "know thyself", asking "what is wisdom".....to neuro-physiologists and artificial intelligence brain-dissecters .. looking for origins of conscious content in the lower-level base, as opposed to use of the 'functional apparatus' model of the anatomic preparation for mapping the totlity. (No Calvinist God-gene, I reckon; that's a spoof; like DNA 'gayness').

5. The juxtaposition when he was president of Ronald Reagan and an AIDS child in a photo-op has stuck with me over these years. The images and associations flowing together to vivify this vignette on that occasion, back around '84, return and flow together again to bring back threads into the present, humors turned to bile.

6. The image of the totality of American Male sexual being being spent on Love Dolls imported from Japan ...order one with credit card and iPhone today! -- has that glint of objective absurdity attached to it...

7. The completing of

*****

What has happened in each of these examples can be explained by the effects of Laughing Gas, N20 on the psychic system. The loosening of signs by means of which we communicate takes place as described by Wm James. The given habitual order, memory-loops, rection-arousal feedbacks, falls away, along with the assumption of "representation of one world." Words, word-parts, numbers-as-signs, pictures tumble around in the head, as if the qualities, external objects, solid material bodies of ordinary experience were dissociated.

Such a phenomenon can be explained through the results of Gurdjieffs mental experiments, when an apparatus was hooked into his skull sending "tripping- jolts" through his system, described thus:

"At first,what is called my 'initiative-of-constatation proceeded in the usual way, that is, according to what is called the 'center-of-gravity-of-associative-experiencing , but later, when this initiative of constantation of everything proceeding in me gradually and almost imperceptibly became the function of my essence alone, the latter not only became the unique all-embracing initiator of the constating of everything proceedig in me, but also everything, without exception of newly proceeded, began to be perceived and fixed in this essence of mine." (A&E, 164)

I am taking that say: as he experiences himself undergoing dissolution, all that remains to hold experience together into a unity is the inner factor he calls "essence", taken here as, roughly, soul-coating -- his sense of himself as an individual. This is as if a permanent factor, thenceforth fixed by this experienced dissolution and shift of center, as an imprinted content and function.

"From the moment that my essence began to perceive impressions directly, and to constate independently thta from what was proceeding, the was being entirely destroyed, as it were, in my common presence, firstly that parts of my planetary body, then, little by little, also the localizations of the 'second' and 'third' being-centers. At the same time a constatation was definitely made that the functioning of these centers passed gradually to my 'thinking-center' and became proper to it, with the consequences that the 'thinking-center' with the increasing intensity of its functioning, became the 'unique-powerful-perceiver' of everything actualized outside itself, and the autonomous initiator of the constating of everything proceeding in the whole of my presence as well as outside it."

Comment: .... when the unified results of normal processing are broken down into separate constituent parts, and the "upper rarefied" processes followed by the flow-of consciousness are concentrated solely in the 'thinking center", as G. describes above, it is possible to append this note: of the three constituents of normal consciousness proceeding from the three feeling, movement and thinking centers, those from the feeling, the Holy Reconciling center, are key to unified totality of the three centers in a single experience (under 'own I')

The N2O effect explains one major strand of what is happening to the American psyche today, I hold. It's soul containers have come apart. Its feeling- centers still function, but with unity dispersed throughout the psychosemiotic system. The signs, rituals, gestures, poses, arranged by the MSM for them to see themselves and others through the lenses of, sucked up into phenomenal content for the thinking-center, alone, appear like mechanical sock-puppet lines which the characters playing roles on a vast historical drama are acting out, knowing-unknowingly to themselves.

it is watching itself wrongly complete itself (transition from TI to DO on a great historical octave), courting the eternal danger of never being able to return to a bio-renewable default position.