Freedom and Mechanization
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.65
Theory and Opposition > The Human Machine
Theoretical move: McGowan uses Bergson's theory of comedy (mechanization as comic) as a springboard to argue that the truly comic lies not in mechanization per se but in the *transition* between opposites—human/machine—which reveals a non-self-identical identity-in-difference (contradiction) at the heart of the comic, thus reframing Bergson's vitalist insight in implicitly Hegelian terms.
It is the rigidity of mechanized being that highlights the contrast with the freedom that Bergson associates with the openness of time. If we knew only this openness, we would have no awareness of it. In this sense, mechanization must be as integral to subjectivity as temporality is to it.