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Prevailing Winds: ha ha.

It is perhaps constructive to recognise the role of prevailing winds in our engagement with the transmission of words, symbols and images. There are many prevailing winds. Some are so light we barely perceive them and others so strong they dominate everything. Ubu’s winds blow ill from every orifice, and we might well be justified in equating Trump (in name and nature) as a real world Ubu. However, in the flap and bluster there is hidden potential of what such bellows, gusts and wafts can expose of an over-accepted axiom or dogma.

Whilst being able to speak, the only words the bottom-faced baboon Bosse-de-Nage, Faustroll’s sidekick in the Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, (Jarry, 1911), utters throughout the story are, “ha ha”. The book however, elaborates on the meaning of these utterances, duly expounding upon the ontology of being and the measurement of time and space. Daumal, in his essay Pataphysics and The Revelation of Laughter (Daumal, 1929), rearticulates these ideas, locating laughter as an expanding creative force at the centre of the universe.
Like any flag, (although, as they are ubiquitously deployed in authoring and asserting fixed and symbolic identities, this might not be generally or widely accepted, and under such winds, those flags are invariably celebratory or a provocation) the only time a flag’s signifier – whether motif or text - is fully produced is when the wind fully unfurls the fabric to fully display the text or motif. This occurs even more rarely with two flags that should read together, where this event could more cosmologically be understood as a syzygy (the coming together of worlds), in that it takes a specific fluke of the wind, sunlight and perception all to come together at a single moment to fully constitute the two unfurled flags as rendering ‘ha ha’.

At all other times the signifier is partially disclosed or undisclosed and therefore, we should also accept that it might then potentially be disclosing something quite different (for example, like similar words which denote very different things). With the ‘ha ha’ flags*, described here via machine writing, we might see such things as; ‘h’, ‘(‘, ‘(a’, ‘/:’, ‘h;’, ‘\a’, although this also goes to show the slippage between machine writing and those letters appearing in material space. Furthermore, this demonstrates the inadequacy of the representational signifier to firstly; always render itself fully, and secondly; in both partially furled and unfurled forms, fully account for reality.  In many ways words are usually in a wind of some sort, prevailing or otherwise, which like laughter and like the stammer, ought to open challenges to our representational and linguistic faith.

Speaking as someone who stammers and likes to laugh, the partial or semi-furled utterances of the ‘ha ha’ flags, and Bosse-de Nage’s more-than-human utterances, and Daumal’s laughter, act in the same way that we might consider a stammer, not as a limitation or failure to be fluent with hi-fidelity expression, but as a difference gateway that configures new material patterns of reality and offers insight to the sleight of hand and limitations of language.

­‘ha ha’.

*If you apply this idea to territorial or identity-based flags such as: UVF / UDA / IRA / MAGA then, phonetically, you could end up with such wonderful open possibilities as, for example; uUvVvFf, uVuuFfF / UUUDda, UuuDAaaa / iIrrAaaa, IiiRaaaA / mMaaagGa, MmmmaGggga or versions where the linguistic phonetic possibilities absolutely breakdown to rich tangential utterances like {/<< or \?ñ.