Deliberative Democracy and Comic Voice

Sammy Basu PhDAssociate Professor of Politics

Willamette UniversitySalem Oregon, USA

Overview

1. Deliberative democracy2. What’s so bad about humor?

3. What is humor?4. What’s so bad about

deliberative democracy?5. The ironic speech situation

Deliberative democracy

2. What’s so bad about humor?

Jurgen Habermas and the Ideal Speech Situation according to which “In the final analysis, the normative content arises from the very structure of communicative actions” (1996:26).

Jedediah Purdy (1999) in For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today.

9-11 encouraged commentators across the ideological spectrum to opine hopefully, as Roger Rosenblatt (2001) did in Time, that “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony.”

1. The boor

2. The Cynic

A kind of high-water mark in popular humorphobia was reached with Purdy’s For Common Things. In it Purdy (1999:xii) pointed to “the widespread cultivation of irony as a personal manner” as the source of the national inhibition “to speak earnestly of uncertain hopes.”

3. The buffoon

For Habermas (1982:271), “jokes, fictional representations, irony, games, and so on, rest on intentionally using categorical confusions which, in the wake of the differentiation of validity-claims and corresponding modes (being/illusion, is/ought, essence/appearance), are seen through as category mistakes.”

4. The hysteric

3. What is humor?

Theories of HumorPhysiological/Sensory

Affective/Evaluative

RELIEF:pleasurable relief as pent-up nervous energy, anxiety, or sensory excitement is rapidly deflated

RELEASE:pleasurable release of psychic energy otherwise used to regulate or repress socially taboo topics or desires

(Juxtaposition)the close juxtaposition of two or more phenomena, frames, etc.

INCONGRUITY:pleasurable recognition of the close juxtaposition of the familiar against what initially is unexpected and/or meaningless but subsequently proves compactly yet pivotally meaningful

SUPERIORITY:pleasurable sense of one’s relative eminence at the expense of someone or something aggressively downgraded

Cognitive/Intellectual

Physiological/Sensory

Affective/Evaluative

Hysteric BoorRELIEF: RELEASE:

(Juxtaposition)

INCONGRUITY: SUPERIORITY:

Buffoon Cognitive/Intellectual Cynic

4. What’s so bad about deliberative democracy?

Boor,

or

Devil’s

Advocate?

“It would seem that you cannot be funny without being vulgar — …. For it is not only sex that is ‘vulgar’. So are death, childbirth and poverty, the other three subjects upon which the best music-hall humour turns. And respect for the intellect and strong political feeling, if not actually vulgar, are looked upon as being in doubtful taste. You cannot be really funny if your main aim is to flatter the comfortable classes: it means leaving out too much. To be funny, indeed, you have got to be serious.” Orwell (1968)

2. Buffoon, or

Holistic critic

Specific critic

Linguistic critic

Holistic criticism: Modern Times

Specific

Criticism

Linguistic criticism:

Support our tropes

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4. Hysteria or just cracking up?

5. The ironic speech situation

Truth

ideal reasonedspeech

testimony

Critical Disengagement

exit foot-dragging andmumbling

critical engagement throughcomic voice

lipserviceandmarching

loyalty Uncritical Engagement

fraud

force

Untruth