Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer

Derrida’s discussion of pharmakon, generalized from the German word, meaning both “gift” in the English sense, and “poison.” Derrida activates this terminology to work within his own critique of “present,” to exploit its amphibology to provoke thought about the role of temporality in metaphysics. One version of the story attributes Pandora’s motivation not to malice but curiosity. “The gods presented her with a box into which each had put something harmful, and forbade her ever to open it. They then sent her to Epimetheus, who took her gladly although Prometheus had warned him never to accept anything from Zeus. He took her, and afterward when that dangerous thing, a woman, was his, he understood how good his brother’s advice had been” (Hamilton 70). When Pandora opened her box, “out flew plagues innumerable, sorrow and mischief for mankind. In terror Pandora clapped the lid down, but too late. One good thing, however, was there—Hope.” The iconography of this (X) “box” evolved from the original giant round jar used in ancient times for storage through a small, square cosmetics or jewelry box to (in modernism) the female sex organ (Panofsky and Panofsky): the mandorla as guiding emblem (celebrity girls-gone-wild). Flash reason searches the euphemist detours of tropology.

      In which I Laugh

      I took a break from the perplexities of concept avatar to watch Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 3, “The Good News.” In a scene of domestic relations between Joan Harris (the redhead office manager) and her doctor husband Greg, Greg tells Joan a joke. Freud commented that we do not know what we are laughing at when we laugh at a joke. It is an involuntary reflex associated with unconscious motivations. Here is a version of the joke.

      Hillbilly 1: Let’s play twenty questions.

      Hillbilly 2: What’s that?

      Hillbilly 1: I write something down on this piece of paper, and you can ask me up to twenty questions to try to guess what it is.

      (Hillbilly 1 writes down “donkey dong” and tells his friend to start guessing).

      Hillbilly 2: Is it something you can eat?

      Hillbilly 1: I suppose so.

      Hillbilly 2: Is it donkey dong?

      Laughter. How many stories have I read about Eureka moments in history? Some hero of heuretics struggling with an impacted interrogative, in a distracted moment during a quotidian activity, due to the mysteries of incubated learning, suddenly gets it. Will history record—along with Archimedes’ bath, Newton’s apple, Poincare’s bus—Ulmer’s donkey dong? Perhaps not, since it remains to be seen if the knowledge triggered by this laugh proves fruitful. Handbooks teaching the craft of comedy have no trouble explaining the formula for a joke of this type (Dean). The formula is simple to state: compose a set-up through exposition that creates in the audience a certain expectation, based on shared cultural background (habitus). This habitus constitutes your wisdom. For example, your expectation that I am speaking of prudence. It turns out, in fact, that dharma, as Krishna explains it to Arjuna, resembles what we call habitus. Expectation, anticipation, foresight: these are the powers of prudence we are probing.