A messy house

The world of cartoons is often a messy one, and we wonder why kids find so much amusement in it.

How does it usually start?

1. There is a sort of Equilibrium. For example, a cat is given charge of a house.
2, An agent of Chaos enters, like a mouse, and disrupts the Peace (like the Parasite).
3. The Agon begins. The conflict of two orders leads to the disturbance of the household peace. Usually an object like a piece of chicken or cheese becomes the centerpiece of the conflict. Now Comedy starts as the house goes into disarray.
4. Conflict is resolved when the house owner arrives: resolution by a Third party, as if by deus ex machina.

Ironically, this conflict or intersection of two paradigms or wills drives the energy of the Narrative or Story. Here, we see a very basic formalism, which portrays the Narrative as the tale of this dynamic shifting from Equilibrium to Disequilibrium to another (temporary) Equilibrium.

(In the film "Oblivion," Jack Harper lives in a peaceful narrative housing. Enter Malcolm Beech. The next events spin a new narrative, in conflict with the first. Only the narrative bias--the "Alien" vs. the "Human"--prevents us from overruling the veracity of the second narrative, but this insertion suffices to open up the first one and lead it into a crisis.)

Two people talking. One tells a joke that involves a distortion of language, like a pun. Instead of a puzzled look, there is a burst of laughter. Someone clueless wonders what's so funny; he does not "get it." Someone asks, "What do you mean by that? Oh, I see, so by saying that you mean to say this, and not that meaning which I would have taken you to be saying."

Each language event is a potential renegotiation. New fleeting houses keep forming.

How are the rules of meaning negotiated when the borders of linguistic rules seem to overflow? There must be, in this flow from a peaceful state of language to a moment where the borders are readjusted to take account of a comic moment, a dynamic similar to the messy world of kiddie cartoons.

Chomsky: didn't he want to establish the Eternal Peace of the house of language? Didn't this attempt actually fuel all the more the conflicts after?

A global peace in the house of language is a great hope. However, everyday, what we hear more often is a comic narrative. The stability of meaning is a temporary, localized phenomenon, a short-lived peace that dissipates in the next round of negotiations. There are always borders, sites of renegotiation. Each creates a ripple, a pocket of chaos that reinvigorates the narrative of language.

Again, somewhere, a house goes into disarray, and a comic moment resurges.