The Quantum Paradox of Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the Postmodern Condition
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.2.2.0153
ISSN2333-9934
Autores Tópico(s)Comics and Graphic Narratives
Resumo"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks."— Albert Einstein1 When Studies in American Humor conceived of a special issue on recent satire, we framed the topic by asking contributors to test the usefulness of the postmodern condition as a rubric. How might the concept demarcate a poetics of contemporary American comic art forms that use ridicule to enable critique and promote the possibility of social change?Whatever distinctions might be or are being made about what to call the contemporary cultural and artistic era, beyond simply the contemporary—remodernism, performatism, hypermodernism, automodernism, renewalism, altermodernism, digimodernism, or metamodernism—the idea of a postmodern condition, most memorably offered by Jean-François Lyotard in La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport Sur Le Savoir (1979), can still function as an analytical gambit not just for considering the contemporary scene for the art of satire, but perhaps also for evaluating satirical works produced in the United States since so-called black humor flourished in the 1960s.2 The entanglement of basic terms complicates how to name the moment supposedly separating the postmodern from a new contemporary era of social relations and aesthetic concerns. The distinction between modern and postmodern registers as ambiguously as anything claiming to supplant the postmodern, given the persistence of modernism in many of its would-be supplanters.3Nevertheless, a central concept from Lyotard that has created an intelligible contour to the postmodern condition involves turning away from the grand narratives found, for example, in an Enlightenment telos of social progress, humanist intellectual history, Christian eschatology, and Marxist historiography: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives," says Lyotard.4 In particular, the metanarrative of ineluctable scientific progress has been undercut by insights developed with quantum physics, cybernetics, dissipative structures, information theory, fractal theory, chaos theory, and string theory; all have produced complicating, disaggregating knowledge about the physical world, with profound impacts on human societies. Moreover, technological changes in communication and mass media have reshaped the ways in which societies receive and understand such science as advancements. Lyotard's influential report might have been heralded by a line from a famous modernist poem—"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."5Skepticism toward metanarratives as well as the impact of technology and science on all domains of human society, then, provide the first necessary ingredients for understanding the production and consumption of contemporary satire in the United States, production and consumption that have reached unprecedented levels. Rachel Caufield and Rob King have argued that we are currently in a new golden age of satire, an assertion that might strike one as obvious, given the unrivaled ascendency of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and John Oliver as pop culture satirists.6 The popularity of work by Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Amy Schumer, for example, like the 2016 addition of Samantha Bee's Full Frontal (TBS) to the weekly line-up of broadcast shows, indicates the strength of gender-inflected satire. Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show (Comedy Central, 2015–2016) brought an African American sensibility to the broadcast scene memorably expressed earlier by Chappelle's Show (Comedy Central, 2003–2006) and more recently by Key & Peele (Comedy Central, 2012–2015). Trevor Noah's current version of The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 2015–present) features an international as well as person of color's satiric point of view, enabled by Noah's South African background. These examples suggest an unprecedented diversity to accompany satire's unprecedented visibility. A survey of satire in a stand-up format would easily elaborate this televisual hint of its ubiquity.7The ubiquity of satire in contemporary culture has occurred, in part, via the newest mass medium, the Internet, with its progeny YouTube a video world unto itself. Podcasts and streaming take their place as new formats in older media, existing alongside social media platforms that have a potential for comic presentation. Two new forms testify to our collective short attention span: Vines (sketch comedy in six-and-half seconds?) and Twitter (haiku satire?). These communication platforms blur genres in unforeseen ways. Geoffrey Baym calls this genre blurring "discursive integration," a concept he offers as a way of speaking about, understanding, and acting within the world defined by the permeability of form and the fluidity of content. Discourses of news, politics, entertainment, and marketing have grown deeply inseparable; the languages and practices of each have lost their distinctiveness and are being melded into previously unimagined combinations.8 Discursive integration can be read as another symptom of a postmodern condition, a consequence of rejecting metanarratives and settled conceptual boundaries. For Baym and other scholars, discursive integration has become a key factor in analyses of twenty-first-century satire because the "fundamental blurring of conceptual categories and media discourses … has created both the conditions and the need for the emergence of comedy as a site of political conversation."9Partly in deference to Baym's assertion that new media and new formats have blurred discursive genres, I treat satire here as a comic mode that cuts across genres rather than as a form embedded in a literary history. Notably, this move receives a historical warrant for its usefulness because evidence suggests that satire named a proper genre only for the Romans, who gave the Western comic tradition many classic examples, while also indicating a catch-all quality—a poetic medley—when satura becomes lanx satura, a mixed dish.10 Given how broadcast and online outlets now serve up news, satire as faux news, politics, and entertainment as a generic mélange, one could still illustrate satire using the image of a mixed dish. This mixed or mashed-up quality correlates with a basic assumption of scholars in several disciplines investigating satire in all media and with various methodologies: thinking of satire as a literary genre has outlived whatever usefulness it might have once had. Satire is better understood as a particular kind of speech act that signals a particular kind of comic attitude.11However, if recent analyses sound a warning against conceptualizing satire as a form or as a literary genre, we still need parameters for using the word as a heuristic for understanding certain kinds of comic artifacts, so I offer a working definition.Satire signifies a comic attitude and a comic tactic, and names a mode within the discourse of The Comic.12 Satire entails an act of judgment based on an implicit or explicit (moral) value often made with an intent to reform or change the comic butt (target) of a ridiculing presentation. Reform does NOT reference a real-world social or political policy change, but rather entails a potential metanoia, a change in thinking, perception, or belief, even a repentance of the old way of thinking, perceiving, believing. As with all comic artifacts, satire must be understood within a play frame. However, satire displays a paradoxical structure. Analogous to light at quantum levels behaving as both wave and particle, satire registers as both serious speech and nonserious (comic) speech—apparently stepping out of and back into its play frame. This definition implies that satire is the most public of comic modes, always part of the public sphere conversation within a body politic, the comic mode most involved with civic issues and so most likely to have extra-textual references to current social and political events.Perhaps the most corrosive brand of satire is what Steven Weisenburger calls "degenerative," which targets not specific people or events but rather uses its ridiculing tactics to call into question codes of knowledge understood as foundational. Moreover, degenerative satire's symbolic violence offers no possibility of generating a return to a normative order. Informed by poststructuralism's embrace of contingency and its radical doubt about representation and narrative telos, degenerative satire fits the postmodern condition. Weisenburger does not argue that all satire in America after World War II is degenerative in its comic assault on the very ability to have normative standards, but he does sketch a convincing genealogy that includes the so-called black humorists of the 1960s as the leading edge of a recognizable postmodern aesthetic for satire.13 The articles in this special issue address an implicit question: what has recent satire made of this heritage?Using the definition above as premise and pretext, I organize my comments for introducing the articles in this issue with four theses to highlight what I take to be the basics for understanding satire now: Satire is marked by a methodological paradox, one committed ethically to promote the process of social change, yet also committed comically to use the symbolic violence of ridicule and artful insult.The postmodern condition exacerbates the dilemma of ethical ridicule that has concerned Western thought for centuries: its apparent lack of centering norms or standard values for making comic judgments inevitably complicates the contemporary production and reception of satire.The paradox of satire behaving like light at quantum levels, with a dual nature of being both serious and nonserious speech, enables a potential for social (i.e., real-world) impact well beyond other forms of comic art, despite the postmodern condition.Satire may function as comic political speech, but it is not political speech. Therefore, satire's intent to reform the body politic through ridicule, its claim to pursue truth as an act of parrhesia (speaking truth to power), even its real world impact, does not place it into the realm of the serious speech acts of policy statements and civic actions. I offer these theses in order to elaborate context without looking for a cathedral door onto which they could be collectively nailed. That image, however, is appropriate enough for the topic of satire today in that it evokes protest against entrenched institutional norms while it also implies rules and parameters for protest. By elaborating the theses, I suggest how our contributors' articles in this special issue outline a significant segment of contemporary satire that resists, even as it resides, in a postmodern condition, a segment mixing irony and earnestness to create a hybrid structure of affect. This structure retains the postmodern problematic of unstable representation, but supplements it with an undaunted belief in creative rescripting. The process establishes a discourse of comic parrhesia meant to substitute localized narratives and truths for socially or philosophically outdated metanarratives and transcendental truths. Call this discourse of contemporary comic parrhesia truthiness satire. Thesis 1: Satire is marked by a methodological paradox, one committed ethically to promote the process of social change, yet also committed comically to use the symbolic violence of ridicule and artful insult. Satire entails social responsibility and appears eminently dependable in its moral or judgmental aspect. However, the playfulness inherent in all comic artifacts, plus the degradation of the comic butt entailed in its ridicule, opens satire to the charge of being amoral or unethical. Satire distinguishes itself not simply with a robust rhetorical capacity encased in comic abuse, but also with a constant entanglement in civic issues of the day. Raillery is the old-fashioned word for ridicule, but how to defend its use, even in the cause of social justice? Is it enough to say that the comic ridicule of satire becomes ethically sound only when deployed against those in power, that is, in instances of what the ancient Greeks called parrhesia—in the vernacular, punching up?14Satire's relationship to ethics highlights a particular problem: amusement versus morality. May any issue become comic fodder? What about jokes tagged racist and sexist? Any restriction is tantamount to censorship, so we have the dilemma of having to choose between the pleasure of amusement or the good of morality. Does satire even exist when its intent to reform becomes lost in mere entertainment? What are the ethics of employing ridicule, a rhetorical weapon that might be used for just purposes via instances of satire, but might not necessarily be put to such purposes? Framed by such questions, satire's core issue becomes the possibility of an ethical ridicule, an issue at least as old as Lord Shaftesbury's 1709 "An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor," which explores the claim that ridicule can be a test of truth.15The insistence on a purposeful ethic for ridicule has a long history in Western thought, one that pre-dates Shaftesbury. Stage comedy—from ancient Greece and Rome to the plays of Molière and John Dryden on down to Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard—was deemed a legitimate art form because what we might call its satiric intent provided ridiculous counterexamples of how to behave. However, validating stage comedy as an art form with an ethical purpose has never completely satisfied those who would govern the engine of ridicule that powers satiric intent. When discussing the ethics of satire's ridicule, we encounter a complicating axiom for laughable cultural artifacts: the fundamentally unruly quality of comic laughter. This unruliness always evades efforts to restrict comic laughter and to install all comic artifacts within a totalizing regime of regulation, control, or reason. In charting the West's centuries-long negative reaction to this unruly quality, John Morreall points to traditional links between laughter and children or laughter and madness as well as noting that religious thinkers routinely associated laughter with demons to underscore what Charles Baudelaire calls its diabolical quality.16For Robert Elliott, this unruliness has generated traditional representations of satirists as monstrous or engaging in a kind of black magic, suggesting a primal something underneath any manifestation in artistic form.17 Here we probe the very nature of ridicule: it is dangerous though useful, like fire, and so needs rules for its deployment, especially in the ostensible service of an ethical judgment. Ridicule can function usefully as a vehicle for conveying that judgment, but under what circumstances does ridicule burn down what it should illuminate, and thus become amoral or unethical? If rules are necessary, then whose rules should apply?The terrible literal violence unleashed in 2015 by certain cartoons in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo offers the most obvious recent example of the problem inherent in tolerating the symbolic violence of satiric ridicule, even for an ostensible civic good. Thus public sphere conversation must address what constitutes legitimate satire. Often, such controversy pits free speech against safe spaces; it can also be as complicated as deciding when satiric speech descends into mere rant or insult and from there degenerates into hate speech. What happens when a regime of trigger warnings and micro-aggressions collides with the unruliness of an aesthetic that proclaims, "It is forbidden to forbid"?18 A fraught activity, producing satire necessarily entails ethical dilemma.Thesis 2: The postmodern condition exacerbates the dilemma of ethical ridicule that has concerned Western thought for centuries; the apparent lack of centering norms or standard values for making comic judgments in the postmodern condition inevitably complicates contemporary production and reception of satire. Baym's concept of discursive integration underscores the complicated production of satire within the contemporary American cultural scene: the satirist's voice reaches audiences via the farrago of news, politics, entertainment, and marketing, as though conceptual sound-tracks that discriminate discourses and boost signal-to-noise ratio cannot be found. Jon Stewart's portmanteau infoenterpropagainment also names this phenomenon of smudged or swirled-together discourses, a phenomenon that has become prominent in the wake of cable channels appearing since the 1980s.19 Moreover, the Internet has accelerated discursive integration, with the example of YouTube as an obvious twenty-first-century site for the grass-roots satire of the demos. Social media perhaps even better represent the spawning of outlets and thus a ramped-up potential for comic production from all points of the pop culture compass: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, Snapchat, and the notorious website 4chan.Demonstrating the role of technology in enabling discursive integration, these Internet platforms epitomize not just a topsy-turvy proliferation of formats but also the anarchic quality of what might pass for comic artifacts in them; they represent the dissipation and fragmentation of centers of authority emphasized by Lyotard. In addition, the polysemic or double-edged and ambiguous quality of comic discourse in general has made it prime territory for colonizing by the postmodern condition, even before this digitally driven explosion of formats. Conditions affecting the production of contemporary satire should also include Jean Baudrillard's regime of simulacra, a regime that blurs traditional notions of fact and fiction; and Julia Kristeva's concept of intertextuality via pastiche, citation, and (re)scripting (e.g., sampling, re-posting, re-tweeting) understood as postmodern carnival. If one word captures these phenomena, it would be Stephen Colbert's truthiness.20Truthiness highlights the postmodern mash-up of discourses that are supposed to keep fact and fiction separate. The neologism satirizes misuse of the phrase gut feeling as a rhetorical device so that it acquires the same weight as factual evidence in political discourse as well as in contemporary media's coverage of civic issues. Colbert's concept of truthiness registers as satirically funny not only because it mocks those who are so steeped in ideology that they jettison actual evidence in favor of accepting a claim because it feels right, but also because it apparently mocks the very pursuit of truth. Truthiness can function as a one-word gloss on postmodernism's turn away from metanarratives and its skepticism about representation. Moreover, the concept of truthiness strikes the funny bone because its ambiguous ridicule of traditional notions of truth evokes the evolution of supposedly documentary news forms into entertainment—news as a commodified spectacle to glue eyeballs to the screen and garner ratings rather than to disseminate facts and information.More broadly, truthiness captures the shift for debating civic issues from the old discursive frame of the Enlightenment's institutional process that privileges rational argument in the service of a public good to the new discursive frame of current media practices that render politics as sport and lodge political events in the theater of show business. In this new frame, drama and spectacle reign as citizens become audience. Politics are marketed so that pundits speak without irony of the Republican or Democratic party brand, and a news report or an interview becomes free advertising for the brand's identity. In his article, "'To Soften the Heart': George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy," Layne Neeper bluntly states the complicating, even corrosive, effect on satire in a culture saturated with postmodern truthiness: The postmodernist project would, of course, seem wholly at odds with satire. Satire depends upon stable shared values that find wide acceptance across a given culture's social imaginary [so that] [p]ostmodern fiction's renowned distrust of ontological certainty or any meaningful metanarrative authority would seem to render it radically antagonistic to the stable codes so apparently necessary to the functioning of satire (281). Without values to replace what is satirically critiqued, the ethical raison d'être of the classic satire epitomized in the Enlightenment vanishes into the void of degenerative satire. This assertion comes with its own problems. Though we may find ourselves in a postnormative world, postmodernism's habit of skeptical irony is not the same as having no values.21 If we cannot agree on a metanarrative of values, the possibility for localized narratives of value remains. For example, Lisa Guerrero's article, "Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness," shows how the ironies in postmodern fictional performance can reanimate a genuine black subjectivity.Other analyses have offered similar conclusions, implying a model for contemporary satire structured as a hybrid, one that reimagines and thus partially repurposes the Enlightenment's discursive frame for satiric treatment of civic issues. Satire within this hybrid model may downplay or even eschew an institutional process in the service of reform proclaimed as a universal public good, yet an assertion of values remains, persistent within postmodern discursive integration. When Marcus Paroske claims in "Pious Policymaking: The Participatory Satires of Stephen Colbert" that Colbert uses postmodern techniques to reach satire's traditional goal of reform, he implies this hybrid satire by labeling Colbert a neo-modern (230). This special issue suggests, however, more than a blurring of a supposed boundary between the modern and the postmodern. Rather, satire's persistent ability to deploy its reforming intent, even within the apparently inhospitable confines of the postmodern condition, operates along a spectrum in the contemporary cultural scene. Steven Weisenburger names an important part of that spectrum with his distinction between Enlightenment or generative satire and a postmodern satire he labels "degenerative," that is, a satire that critiques with ridicule but has no normative value to substitute for the comic butt. The contemporary hybrid model snapshots another color on the spectrum by importing a generative satire back into the postmodern framework.22Contemporary audiences may not always be able to discern the morality of satire within the glut of comic entertainment available, and the concept of truthiness points to postmodernism's apparent indifference to moral value as well as truth. Nevertheless, the concept delivers its satiric punchline because it assumes that an audience still values truth. The very existence of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, as well as Real Time with Bill Maher, The Nightly Show, Full Frontal, and Last Week Tonight, for example, implies that fact, accountability, and reason still matter in public discourse, in what Bill Moyers has called "the conversation of democracy."23Thesis 3: The paradox of satire behaving like light at quantum levels, with a dual nature of being both serious and nonserious speech, enables a potential for social (i.e., real-world) impact well beyond other forms of comic art, despite the postmodern condition. The postmodern condition of epistemological indeterminacy weakens but does not completely erase a key marker differentiating satire from other modes of The Comic in my working definition: an intent to reform. While the center cannot hold absent the moral authority claimed by an Enlightenment regime of rationality that has informed even modernist satire, that metanarrative has been supplanted by stories about diverse, locally oriented satirical projects so that mere anarchy has not been loosed. A hybrid model for satire can be discerned in the contemporary scene, a model displaying reformist intent and ethical values without denying the decentering and apparently always already ironic postmodern frame.Some recent scholarly analyses of contemporary satire have advocated a strong version of the claim for a hybrid structure that weds ethical concerns to a postmodern irony, a claim in which the serious aspect of satire predominates to create what Sophia McClennen and Remy Maisel call "satiractivism."24 Satiractivism appears as performative utterances in which the joking material in a stand-up routine, comic sketch, sitcom, stage play, or fictional narrative does not just imply a promise for political reform but at a certain level apparently performs that change. Satiractivism thus fuses or smears together comic and political speech in a postmodern fashion that replicates discursive integration. Satire from this angle becomes a comic form of political speech. What Rebecca Krefting calls charged humor perhaps best represents satire understood as comic political speech.25 If we return to the analogy of light behaving as both a wave and a particle at quantum levels, the concept of satiractivism underscores in boldface the paradoxical ontology of satire as both serious and nonserious speech.Several examples make this point and provide evidence of how satire's intent to reform, its potential to impact the real world and foster change, can be realized even in a postmodern environment, but perhaps the most famous example is Jon Stewart's appearing on CNN's Crossfire, ridiculing the show, and then CNN's cancelling the show. Similarly, Stewart hosted first-responders who had become ill when the Twin Towers came down because a bill to compensate them, the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, was stalled in Congress. Within days of that Daily Show episode, the bill was passed.26An excellent, more recent example of this fusion of comic and political speech occurred on December 10, 2015, when Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to ask people to contact their congressional representatives about the Zadroga provision up for renewal in the omnibus spending bill then before Congress.27 Stewart did not just make an appeal, as one would at a political rally, or even as he had done for the first iteration of the bill when he featured testimony from actual first-responders. Instead, he mimicked presidential candidate Donald Trump, complete with wig and Cheeto dust smeared on his face in clown fashion—both props courtesy of Colbert—and parodied Trump's blowhard style of speaking to exhort people to express support for the renewal to their congressional representatives. Parodying The Donald using Cheetos for make-up certainly qualifies as comic speech, but Stewart was explicitly asking for political action on a very specific civic issue.The performative nature of Stewart's satiractivism on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with its mimicking of a comic butt, highlights a prominent strategy of recent satire. As Jessyka Finley argues, his parody could be called a postmodern citation, but that citation operates as a reminder of specific actual events, not simply as an ironic distancing from them. The affect of being ironic yet earnest characterizes the hybrid model of satire, made visible by a turn to activism within the postmodern condition, what Finley calls "comic soapboxing" (242).Being ironically earnest becomes particularly important when stereotypes are the comic butt. Stereotypes are a form of citation that evokes an imaginary chorus of previous uses.28 Because comic speech reiterates stereotypes, the possibility exists that those comic iterations can function satirically as ways to resist and undermine the stereotypes. Some of Dave Chappelle's best comic sketches, for example, reiterate stereotypes with this subversive intent. However, the problematic ethic of satiric ridicule takes center stage when the comic use of stereotypes comes into focus because comic iterations of stereotypes do not necessarily promote subversion. They may be deployed mostly to entertain an audience that recognizes from daily experience traits within the stereotype rather than to subvert the stereotype.29 Moreover, they may be offered not only to entertain but also to sustain racial or gender prejudice.Thesis 4: Satire may function as political comic speech, but it is not political speech. Therefore satire's intent to reform the body politic through ridicule, its claim to pursue truth as an act of parrhesia (speaking truth to power), even its real world impact, does not place it into the realm of the serious speech acts of policy statements and civic actions. I have suggested that the concept of satiractivism in conjunction with the concept of truthiness makes legible a hybrid model of contemporary satire with one foot outside of its postmodern condition of self-conscious and detached irony set within epistemological indeterminacy. The label truthiness satire acknowledges the recent turn toward a robust notion of satire's traditional intent to reform that complements a habit of reaching for parrhesia while also admitting satire's continual embeddedness in a pop culture scene suffused with representational ambiguity and lacking a convincing metanarrative. Nevertheless, I want to conclude my theoretical remarks by making clear what kind of speech act satire is and is not, even at the risk of apparently stating the obvious.While I want join with the authors of this issue's articles in asserting the performative quality of truthiness satire as satiractivist speech, as an apparent fusion of comic speech with political speech, such satiractivist speech should not be claimed as either political speech or political action. Such speech, including Krefting's category of charged humor, may have the rhetorical effect of a protest, but it is not equivalent to protest in the street.For truthiness satires to work as laughable utterances, their performative aspect must b
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