Bisociation

Bisociation, or the mental association of an idea or object with two separate fields that are ordinarily seen as unrelated, is the key concept in Arthur Koestler's (1905–1983) theory of humor in his book The Act of Creation (1964). This work is, alongside Sémantique structurale (Structural Semantics) by Algirdas Julien Greimas (1966), one of the two significant attempts that were made in the 1960s to embed units with twofold planes of meaning, including humor and figurative speech, into the broader supersystems of theories of creativity and general semantics.

Greimas's interests were not specifically focused on the theory of humor or the theory of figurative speech, but on establishing a deductive theory of general semantics. One of the basic concepts of his theory is the notion of isotopy, which means different readings of ambiguous expressions, for which Greimas aims to develop a unified procedure of semantic disambiguation wherever necessary, be it for ordinary language, metaphoric language, or humor.

Koestler's book, in turn, is an exposition of his general theory of creativity; the treatise of humor constitutes only about one seventh of the book. According to Koestler, the fundamental forms of the revelation of creativity constitute a kind of triptych—humor, discovery, and art. All of these are founded on bisociation (a.k.a., bisociativity), that is, the specific, conceptually two-planed nature of any creative act. In the case of humor, this means a comic collision of or oscillation between two frames of reference, worlds of discourse, codes, or associative contexts; in the case of scientific discovery— objective analogy; and in the case of art—the image. The three types of creator are respectively the jester, the sage, and the artist, and the three “emotional moods” corresponding to the types of creativity are aggressive in the case of humor, neutral in the case of discovery, and sympathetic, admiring, or tragic in the case of art. Whether the bisociative collision and switch result in a joke, solution of a logical problem or scientific discovery, a metaphor, or sublime or tragic experience depends on the specificity of the situation, content of the recipient's memory, personal emotional state, and structure of values, for example.

To Koestler's mind, humor involves a paradox because laughter is a universal physiological reaction to a very great variety of different complex intellectual and emotional stimuli. So he evidently seems to share the view that humor cannot be grasped a single conception or theory. Nor is Koestler's own theory of humor purely bisociative but includes obvious elements of superiority/ degradation theory, as well as psychoanalytic theories. Koestler argues that humor is motivated by aggressive or apprehensive, self-defensive, or assaulting impulses, and laughter is said to be an act of overt or covert unloading of these impulses. [Page 84]Our biological evolution, he says, has fallen dangerously behind our mental development. Aggressive-defensive emotions descend from our neurobiological “deep layers” and have greater persistence and inertia than our evolutionarily later developed flexible reasoning. Therefore, a sudden bisociation of a mental event with two habitually incompatible matrices/associative contexts/frames of reference causes a sudden jump from one matrix to another, but our emotions cannot follow such quick togglings and so our psychological tension finds the solution in laughter, that is, along the “channel of least resistance.”

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