Author: castoreum

“In the same measure as princes have discovered a way to make themselves masters of our secrets through the art of opening our mail without anyone’s being able to tell that it’s been opened, we have also discovered the art of publishing their secrets by even more secret means of printing.”

“Sometimes I’ll read a whole history without paying the slightest occasion to the blows exchanged in battle or the thickness of the walls of towns that have been seized.  Alert only to the habits of men, I take pleasure in watching that long parade of passions and fantasies.

“In the history of jealousy, it may be seen that men are not always governed by nature and reason, but rather by pure chance, and that certain circumstances that do not seem important in themselves may have such an influence on men, and drive them on with so much force and constancy, that they can twist man’s entire nature.

“When Darius had made a law that prohibited adultery, the Massagetai informed him that they could hardly obey it because they had a custom of lending out their wives to their guests.  Whatever force that custom may have had, it’s certain that a Massagete who loved his wife and prostituted her to a stranger would have been rather troubled if his wife had ended up loving this stranger more than him; he would have been happy to fulfill an exterior duty, but he would doubtless have wished his wife to restrain herself to what civility required and to preserve for him a heart that he held dear.  The inhabitants of that country were so honourable (honnête) that they wanted to demonstrate to guests that they would give to them that which they loved the best, and this very fact should make us think that a man would have been rather troubled to lose for all time the love of a woman that he had only given up for a moment.

“For certain prejudices to become general, and for these prejudices to lend their tone to the rest of social life, it has been necessary for large societies to form.

“There were two peoples who fought for the title of oldest, the Egyptians and the Scythians.  Isis and Osiris ruled among the Egyptians; they were placed among the gods; Isis had preeminence over her husband, and, in her, her whole sex found respect.  In her honor, the Egyptians submitted themselves to their wives, and they bent themselves so much to this servitude that, taking care of the housework, they left all business outside the household to their wives.  They succeeded to the kingship alongside their brothers, etc.

“As for the Scythians, history teaches us that certain of their women slew their husbands.  Calling marriage a servitude rather than an alliance, they founded the empire of the Amazons, built Ephesus, and conquered almost the whole of Asia.

“The prejudices of nations have the same prejudices as empires [sic].  It takes hardly any effort at all to give one people the prejudices of another, and the progress of this process can be so great that it transforms, so to speak, the entire spirit of human nature.  This is what makes man so hard to define.

“Isn’t it true that, if Islam had conquered the whole world, women would be shut indoors everywhere?  This way of governing them would be regarded as natural, and we would have trouble imagining that there could be another.  If the women of Scythia had continued their conquests, if the Egyptians had continued theirs, mankind would live in servitude to women, and one would have to be a philosopher to say that another kind of government was more in conformity with nature.”

 

I woke up this morning with a hangover, which somehow got worse when I saw that gawker.com was finally going under.  Anyone who’s been following the story knows that this comes after a multi-year campaign of legal harassment by delicate billionaire Peter Thiel.  That he’s been able to destroy a journalistic outlet this way is, of course, bad news for people who care about a free press and an open society.

One way to worry less about the precedent this sets is to pretend that Gawker, after 14 years of violating journalistic norms, somehow “got what was coming to it.”  All sorts of people whose opinions I usually respect have made this claim or something like it in recent months.  Even Gawker’s most ardent backers now sometimes preface their declarations of support with a caveat of the form, “I don’t agree with the way Gawker covers every issue, but…”  I think that making this kind of concession is a mistake, and I’m going to try to say why.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the Bollea-Gawker case with a friend of mine.  I was surprised to find out that he took Hulk Hogan’s side – although I shouldn’t have been, because he gets most of his news and views from reddit.  He thought it was clear that Gawker had violated Hogan’s privacy by publishing the fatal sex tape.  He also looked forward to the demise of the site and the “celebrity culture” that it represented.  When I asked him if he’d read Gawker lately, he said no; in fact, he added, he’d never read it.

To say that Gawker is only, or even primarily, about “celebrity culture” is to misrepresent pretty badly what the site does.  That point’s been made already by Gawker’s own staff writers, and I’m not going to rehash the argument here.  Instead, the question I want to ask is this: what’s so bad about covering “celebrity culture?”

To my friend, it seemed obvious that gossip about the rich and famous was valueless in itself and did harm by distracting us from more important issues.  A few years ago, I would have said the same thing, and I was surprised to find myself questioning what had been my basic position about entertainment news for most of my life.  But something about me, or something about the world, had changed.

One way to get more concrete about “celebrity culture” is to characterize it as a set of beliefs about celebrities.  The rich and famous have an interest in shaping what people believe about them, and they have  outlets that allow them to do so: Us, Entertainment Weekly, People, and so on.  Other outlets draw readers by puncturing the official story: they titillate us by giving us reason to believe that celebrities are worse, or at least different, than the way we thought they were.

Why pay attention to any of this?

A good reason to pay attention is that we might wish to be undeceived.  We might wish to know truer things, in general, about the world in which we live.  We might especially wish to know the truth about celebrities who have become, or are likely to become, political figures – people like Donald Trump or, in a more shadowy way, Peter Thiel himself.

The fact of the matter is, though, that every celebrity is in some respect a political figure.  Or it might be that “political” is too weak a word: celebrities play an essentially structural role in our thought world, much as saints, gods, and totem animals did in the thought worlds of premodern cultures.  Celebrities are good to think with, but not only that; we can hardly think without them.

Take, for instance, this mithra/varuna dyad of the modern age: Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston.  Jolie, for us, represents pleasure and indulgence in pleasure; unrestrained fertility; the capture and subversion (in her avatar Brangelina) of man by woman; and, for those of us whose memories stretch back to the nineties, the spectral connection of all these things with death.  Aniston, on the other hand, figures restraint; the danger restraint poses, that we might somehow miss the right moment; gentle kindness; infertility; and woman as at the disposal of multiple men.   Each actress compresses a range of notions and sentiments into a symbol whose content may no longer explicitly be thought, even when it’s felt.  Tabloids and the outlets of the entertainment industry have worked in tandem to make Aniston out as a more sympathetic figure, and that’s political work – a way of training us to know what a “good woman” should be like.

Which brings me to Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan, whose privacy and its notional violation lie at the heart of this mess.  Hogan began his career as a camp parody of a certain kind of masculinity, and he was going to end it – up until the release of the sex tape, which in its entirety showed Hogan using a variety of racial slurs – as an icon of that masculinity for real.  In his second life as a reality TV star, he acted the part of a kind of father figure in whom there was always a potential for violence lurking just beneath the surface.  This brutal swagger, we were led to believe, actually made Hogan a better father.  His controlling impulses were all to the good, and the entitlement to control from which these impulses stemmed always seemed, in the end, to be justified.

A representation like that has cultural and political consequences, for sure, and ones that seem to me to be deleterious if not actually dangerous.  When Gawker published Hogan’s sex tape, what was demonstrated was that the representation was not real.  This wasn’t something we needed to be reminded of, perhaps, except that it was: we understood that Hogan’s character had always been a representation, but we didn’t know how poorly the face fit the mask, and a lot of people, for lack of energy or interest, had been willing to assume that face and mask were one and the same.  Now, the icon of the violent and controlling but still in every sense “good” father has been shattered.  It turns out to have been hiding a demented, hateful sex fiend, a glib hypocrite who denies pleasure to others while recklessly indulging in it himself.  We thought he was a hero; all along, he was just a Florida Man.

This is important.  This is work that needs to be done, and to conflate it with celebrity self-branding under the heading of “celebrity culture” is to confuse the solution with the problem.  The stultifying thing about celebrities is that they can force us, through the sheer volume of their communication, to believe things about them that would beggar belief in a romance novel or an action movie.  Gawker’s brand of rumor- and gossip-mongering revealed the real and much more interesting stories behind these serried facades.  By doing so, it freed us to think.

Privacy was the moral standard under which Gawker’s assassins drove in the knife.  What is privacy for the rich and famous but the privilege of lying, not only about themselves, but about the way the world works?  Peter Thiel, for instance, would have us believe that he’s the protagonist from an unwritten Ayn Rand novel.  Gawker’s sister site, Valleywag, was able to show up Thiel as not a genius but a buffoon who’d had a run of good luck.  In outing him as gay, they revealed that Thiel’s personal behavior stood in conflict with the homophobic hate speech that he had, earlier in his career, done so much to defend and even promote.  Peter Thiel’s “privacy” was a means of self-fabrication, and we’re all better off with the veil torn away.

It needs to be added that “privacy” is not a right that many of us enjoy anymore, at least not in a meaningful sense.  We film ourselves, we record ourselves, our phones may even record us without our knowledge; someone, somewhere, already knows almost everything we might want to hide about ourselves.  Peter Thiel’s silicon valley colleagues have every interest in intensifying this surveillance through devices like Google Glass, which is essentially an always-on mobile spy platform, and – further down the line – through the development of nano-scale intelligence-gathering technologies like smart dust.  Already, privacy as we used to know it is in many respects the preserve of the wealthy, and this is only going to become more true as time goes on.  Why should we fight to preserve as a “right” what’s really a privilege that most of us can’t afford, and that, in its exercise by those who can afford it, surely does us harm?

Why, indeed?

Everyone knows that wrestling is fake, but not everyone likes to be reminded of that fact.  Much the same can be said of the personas that celebrities craft for themselves.  Getting past the personas takes work – which, until recently at least, the journalists at Gawker did for us.  Rethinking our world in the absence of those personas, though, also takes work, and that’s work we can only do for ourselves.  It’s easier “not to think” about celebrities – which is really just to take them at face value.  Surely, celebrities like it this way.

 

Why am I worried all of the time?

It’s not because I have a problem.  Everything’s fine on my end.

The truth is, I’m on the receiving end of a problem pipeline.  My processing power is being exploited to work through someone else’s issues, in an intensely non-productive way.

I’m not going to surprise anyone when I say that this someone is, at this moment, Trump, he of the capital T.  There’s a guy who figured out, way back in the eighties, how to capitalize on the public’s attention.  The trick he has is to actualize the idea that any publicity is good publicity.  Whatever thinking we do about Trump is, for Trump, pro-Trump thinking.

But I’m also thinking of a conversation that I had with a friend of mine, in my back yard, a couple of years ago – which is to say, before Trump was a Thing.  The through-put of it was that she felt like the news was mustering her to have opinions about things that she wouldn’t have known about otherwise; further, that these opinions were the ones she would have had anyhow, if she’d known about the relevant things; and, finally, that she kind of resented these opinions, because she felt like she was being induced to have them.

I knew exactly what she meant.  We were being mustered to feel, e.g., that a hurricane in Honduras was really awful.  Or a coup in Honduras.  Both things that were, in fact, really awful.  But, at the same time that you felt they were really awful, you couldn’t help but feel you were being mustered to feel that way, which produced an abreaction.

Since then, it’s only gotten worse.  I feel like I’ve been press-ganged to worry about other people’s problems, and that these problems are a good deal less concrete than whatever was going on in Honduras a couple-few years ago.  This is to say, my mind is being colonized.  Thoughts about things that aren’t news have to make excuses for themselves.  They’re subalterns.

I mean this unseriously, but not all that unseriously.  The question of how these subaltern thoughts can get their passports back is, I think, also the question of how Trump can be made to lose.

A figure at once transparent and enigmatic, qualities we should imagine to be shared by what the figure names.

Montesquieu says,

“From my fatherland, I ask neither a pension nor honors nor distinctions; I find myself compensated amply enough by the air that I breathe. I would only desire that it does not become corrupted.”

Corrupt air is air that’s “gone bad,” in the sense that a fruit can go bad, not because its goodness has been decreased but because this goodness has undergone an absolute inversion of polarity. Corrupt air is bad air, no longer fit for giving or maintaining life.

We can distinguish it from the rather less enigmatic notion of “polluted air” in the following way. First, “polluted air” is usually understood as a mixture resulting from the intrusion of noxious elements into the aerobic space of humans, animals, or plants. Second, we conceive of it as a deviation from a norm – let’s call this “clean air,” which stands in a different relation to “polluted air” than the one that holds between “corrupted air” and its opposite, “pure air.” Finally, and in consequence of these other judgments, which enter into the sphere of ecology from atomistic physics and medicine respectively, “polluted air” comes to us as a problem that asks for a technological solution, as a threatening mixture that we should, and can, undo.

“Corrupted air,” to the contrary, results not from the mixture of an outside element into the atmosphere but rather from processes internal to the air itself. Here, too, there is a medical metaphor at work: corruption is what Latin speakers from the third century onward called the decomposition of a human corpse after death. Without the soul to act as its preservative, the body became subject to certain internal processes that marked its movement away from life, and the progress of death within it, according to a progression that we would recognize as decay.

Before the nineteenth century, death stood in relation to life not as a deviation, but as an inversion. In a similar way, “corrupted air” opposes all the values one might attach to “pure air.” Rather that fostering life, it opposes life. The miasma that brings disease, for instance, is a form of corrupted air. So is a nauseating stench. “Corrupted air” is an air that undermines and vitiates the living; and yet it remains air, which is to say, according to the criterion par excellence of pre-modern thought, it remains invisible.

An air not narrowly defined according to an enumeration of elements (elements that a properly-qualified expert might, by use of a condenser, for instance, bring to visibility) but rather embracing the whole realm of invisible things is perhaps now unthinkable. We will, however, not be able to understand the political force of the figure as Montesquieu (and many others before him) employ it unless we can think exactly this kind of total air: an air composed not only of things, but also of motions, intelligences, and thought itself.

Enlightenment thrives in “pure air” – and even in “polluted air.” “Corrupted air” only supports various forms of half-life and semi-conscious life. Montesquieu himself thrived in a pure air which his opponents and persecutors, prigs and churchmen all, strove to corrupt. The Revolution issued in a great purification of the air; in the last years of the Ancien Regime, France’s greatest thinkers were automata.