According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein once said that it might be possible to produce a well-constructed philosophical text comprised entirely of jokes. But is there ground in his work to support such a claim?
Wittgenstein says in his Philosophical Investigations that actions, so far, they follow a rule, must be grounded in intersubjective experience. Rules cannot explain actions, because we can always make coincide an action with an arbitrary rule. In the context of language, to understand means to know how to play a particular game, a language game. Now, the only way to show that I understand a game is by playing it. The other players will confirm or deny that I understand the game if I play like them. To understand seems to demand full agreement. Errors, failures, and inconsistencies would lead to nonsense.
Psychoanalysis defends the opposite. Truth is subjective and it appears when rules are broken. Lapsus linguae, lapsus calami, denegation, contradiction, inconsistency, and jokes are indexes of the unconscious, which break into regular discourse. A common language and a common order are presupposed, but they bear no truth. On the contrary, they are the place of subjective repression and disappearance. Yes, language games grant meaning. But meaning is not the ultimate possibility of language. If language operates in a single layer, where understanding is reduced to follow shared rules, then there is no space for singularity. There is no private language, but there is also no possibility of expression for singulars. Jokes, on the contrary, float in the middle of meaning and nonsense.
Psychoanalysis claims that nonsense has some type of meaning. Isn’t this a contradiction? Yes, all inconsistencies appearing in language, must be reinterpreted and thus lead to a meaningful transformation, but the unconscious as such does not become conscious. Freud highlighted the relationship between lapsus and jokes. A good joke makes sense. But it surprises as it changes the language game in which it was formulated. A new game is invented in situ. A psychoanalyst frames the sentences of the patient as if they were “jokes”, ironic commentaries, i.e. as having double sense. In terms of Wittgenstein, a joke implies a change of language game. This shows that meaningful experience is not played inside one but across several language games. But what rule are we following here?