Introduction: Notes on a Scandal

Scandalous Times Contemporary Creativity and the Rise of State-Sanctioned Controversy Alex Ling Introduction: Notes on a Scandal We live in scandalous times. Every day it seems that we are greeted with some new controversy: some daring act of provocation, some atrocious misdeed, or salacious piece of gossip makes its way to us via our chosen media, demanding our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. The hedge fund manager who absconds with his clients’ money … The famous athlete whose secret doping regimen is suddenly and sensationally exposed for all to see … The former child star who loudly proclaims her newfound adulthood by ramping up her sexuality … The prudish politician who for years has been leading a tawdry double-life … The boundary-pushing artist who finally takes their work that one step too far … That we are easily able to attach myriad proper names to each of these generic examples—and that we can do so with hardly a second’s thought— attests not only to the familiarity with which we embrace these “exceptions to the norm,” but also to the fact that they now arise with such rapidity and regularity as to constitute “normalized exceptions.” Indeed, of the many ironies that are part and parcel of our hyperconnected, later-than-latecapitalist society, one of the most striking is the way that scandals like these, together with the controversy that surrounds them, have become such an expected and even comforting part of our lives. Exactly how it is that these otherwise largely far-removed events and revelations have come to affect us so deeply is another. More remarkable still is the fact that the question of what all of this actually means remains to this day largely unanswered. Or in other words: while we can certainly point to numerous fascinating and sophisticated studies of 2 Scandalous Times scandal—studies that have been undertaken from multiple critical perspectives (sociological, political, anthropological, historical, artistic …) and with regard to a variety of media forms (traditional, mass, digital, social …)—there has as yet been very little properly philosophical consideration of the concept.1 So it would appear that, in this area at least, despite their undeniable ubiquity and influence, scandal is still regarded “as a subject too frivolous to warrant serious scholarly attention.”2 And yet it is precisely this kind of theoretical investigation that is so clearly required today. For while the events themselves may at times appear trivial or insignificant (from an “intellectual” point of view, at least), the consequences they have on our everyday lives are anything but. To be sure, far from representing the meaningless “froth of social and political life,”3 the fact is that contemporary scandals wield a truly alarming subjective power. Our contention here is then that scandals really do mean something (in the significatory as much as the intentional and consequential senses of the word), and this meaning is only reinforced—even intensified—by our obstinate and misguided refusal to recognize it. None of this, of course, is in any way to suggest that the influence the scandal has over its audience has somehow passed by unnoticed in critical commentary. To the contrary, questions of identity formation and social construction, in particular in relation to moral frameworks, have long been an underlying theme of so-called scandal research. So much is this the case that they can even be said to constitute a defining and hence unifying feature of all scandalrelated scholarship, Steffen Burkhardt going so far as to characterize this otherwise diverse field of research as “the systematic and comparative study of scandals as a social ritual that serve the purpose of updating normative moral models in a society and, through communication, contribute to a collective difference and identity formation.”4 Countless examples of this “subjective” focus abound. Max Gluckman’s early anthropological work on “Gossip and Scandal” identifies the latter as a powerful mechanism of social order that functions to preserve “the unity, morals and values of social groups,”5 and which is even strategically employed in some communities “to maintain the principle of equality between all members.”6 Ari Adut’s more recent work on scandal and morality similarly demonstrates how the former not only “trigger a great deal of the normative Introduction: Notes on a Scandal 3 solidification and transformation in a society,”7 but might also easily function as a “social control mechanism.”8 Burkhardt himself identifies as a central function of the contemporary scandal, “the act of upgrading the moral preference code of a social framework,” such that it “negotiates social belonging and non-belonging.”9 Approaching the same idea from a different angle, Sigurd Allern and Ester Pollack point to the dangers of overzealous scandal coverage as reinforcing social conformity, whereby the media’s eventual “symbolic execution” of the scandalous party only “confirms the re-establishment of the social order.”10 Needless to say, it would hardly be difficult to extend this list further. That the bulk of the existing research recognizes the considerable influence the scandal has on the individual subject is not in question here. Our immediate concern rather lies elsewhere; in particular, it rests with the nature of the subject itself. Sovereign Public Subjects While the “intimate” function of scandals in individual and social formation obviously represents a key concern of this book, the way we will be approaching this question differs significantly from previous studies. For one thing, as already indicated, the lens we employ here is neither explicitly political, nor sociological (nor artistic, nor historical …), but rather philosophical. (That being said, our analysis will naturally also take in these other important areas.) To this end, while the work undertaken here is certainly concerned with identifiable historical and contemporary scandals, it is not intended as constituting “scandal research” per se. Moreover, the aforementioned “intimacy” of scandal—the way it so profoundly (if surreptitiously) affects its public—does not represent for us a horizon, as is the case in standard models, but instead constitutes a point of departure. Specifically, in examining the subject of scandal, our first port of call must be none other than the individual subject as such: not the scandalous “subject matter”—i.e., the shocking or salacious details of the event itself—but rather the materiality of the subject on which the scandal acts, namely, the “scandalized,” as opposed to the “scandalous,” subject. 4 Scandalous Times Clearly some words of explanation are required here. One of the major shortcomings of existing scandal research, at least from the standpoint of philosophy, is that the bulk of these studies assumes, seemingly by default, and likely as a result of their predominantly empirical nature, an essentially uncritical or “pre-philosophical” understanding of the individual subject— even if this conception can easily be traced back to Descartes and his famous “cogito.” To this end, the scandalized subject is implicitly (and even, on occasion, explicitly) conceived along the lines of an autonomous and stable entity qua “sovereign individual subject,” as the prepotent “core” of the self, endowed with absolute consciousness, and representing the original and authentic source of action and meaning. This in itself is, of course, hardly surprising: as Pierre Schlag has shown (in reference to normative legal frameworks), this sovereign subject matches the conventional model of the “liberal subject” presupposed in virtually all areas of contemporary thought, and which is assumed to be “autonomous, coherent, self-directing, integrated, rational and originary.”11 Yet this fundamentally (if perhaps unintentionally) Cartesian notion of the fully self-transparent subject—of the subject “certain that there can be nothing in him, in so far as he is a thinking thing, of which he is not aware”12— simply does not square with recent philosophical thought. After all, this basic concept has undergone a massive transformation over the course of the twentieth century alone. Sigmund Freud, for example, showed how the subject is riven by unconscious desires—that “we are ‘lived’ by unknown and uncontrollable forces”13—after which Jacques Lacan contrived to “invert its usage,”14 theorizing it as a void point, the “empty waste” of the cogito. Edmund Husserl’s self-declared “neo-Cartesian” phenomenology (which nonetheless managed to “reject nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy”) further eroded its sovereign basis, dissolving “the illusion of a solipsism” inherent to the cogito with his theory of “transcendental intersubjectivity.”15 Following on from this, Jean-Paul Sartre showed how the subject’s “existence comes before its essence”16—an existence which is entirely conditioned on the mediation of others—while Martin Heidegger demonstrated its basis not in the individual cogito (which “neglect[s] the question of Being altogether”)17 but in transcendent Dasein. Countless more examples present themselves: Louis Althusser held that the subject constituted an ideological fiction; Maurice Merleau-Ponty re-designated it a register Introduction: Notes on a Scandal 5 of pure experience; Michel Foucault showed how it was produced within a network of power relations; Emmanuel Levinas understood it as a category of morality; on and on the list goes.18 This steady process of “de-subjectivization”—of stripping away the autarchic layers of the subject—in fact continues to this day with figures like Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, both of whom enlist mathematics to their cause, the former to reduce the subject to an elementary formalism— not a necessary function but rather a contingent framework; “a configuration in excess of the situation”19—and the latter in order to strip it of its enduring “correlationist” attributes such that we might thereby once again “make our way towards the absolute.”20 While it would be easy, as before, to extend this list with further examples, the basic point should by now have been made clearly enough: from the most intimate aspect of our individual selves, to an abstract framework configuring multiple different objects, the contemporary subject would seem to bear only the most passing resemblance to its classical Cartesian conception. In a word, the subject is today but a shell of its former self.21 All the same, it is this increasingly philosophically obsolete subject that still underlies (and, by the same token, undermines) the lion’s share of scandalrelated scholarship. To be more precise, the bulk of scandal research reformulates this “sovereign individual subject” in terms of an equally sovereign public qua collection of subjects, a “sovereign public subject.” The reason for this is itself straightforward enough, in that a scandal is, by definition, not an individual affair, but rather demands a public (typically an indignant one). Simply put, while the offending subject matter may originally be individual in nature, for it to qualify as “scandal,” this material first needs to undergo some form of public revelation; it must “become public.” As Robert M. Entman succinctly puts it (while glossing one of the dominant approaches to the study of scandal): “no public indignation, no scandal.”22 Or again, this time in the words of Molière’s eponymous Tartuffe, “it’s scandal, Madam, which makes it an offence/And it’s no sin to sin in confidence.”23 At the risk of losing our train of thought, we can derive from this basic proposition two further crucial features of scandal, such as it has been theorized in the existing scholarship: first, that in order to reach a public, the event in question must be “publicized,” meaning it must undergo some form 6 Scandalous Times of mediation (which in today’s hyperconnected world is almost invariably a “mass-mediation” or a “mediatization”);24 and second, that this event—which, it should be pointed out, can be either real or imagined—must in some way deviate from or transgress an (implicitly or explicitly) accepted social order or code of conduct. Thus we already have at hand the three necessary conditions of any scandal, these being: (1) a sovereign public subject, (2) a (real or imagined) transgression of the social-symbolic order, and (3) a process of mediation. The combination of these three essential factors gives us perhaps the most elementary definition of scandal itself, namely, as constituting a mediated process that fascinates the public (principally through the invocation of outrage) by proposing some violation of the given social-symbolic order. In point of fact, almost every definition encountered in the loose field of scandal research proposes some variation on this theme. It is this basic structure, for example, that underlies John Thompson’s influential work on political scandals, in which he offers a preliminary definition of “scandal” as referring to “actions or events involving certain kinds of transgressions which become known to others and are sufficiently serious to elicit a public response.”25 Thompson further clarifies this general definition by identifying five key aspects to scandals, being: a transgression of accepted norms, values, or moral codes; an attempt at concealment by the transgressor; general disapproval by “non-participants” (i.e., figures who are aware of, but not directly involved in, the transgressive event); public denunciation by these non-participants; and some form of ensuing reputational damage to the transgressor.26 While Thompson obviously restricts his focus to explicitly political scandals, the preponderance of “generic” scandal scholarship never strays far from this basic framework. For example, even as he notes that “a general model of scandal […] remains an unrealized desideratum,” Adut nonetheless goes on to propose an admirably concise theory of scandal as “the disruptive publicity of transgression.”27 Burkhardt, for his part, characterizes scandal as “a communication process that sparks public outrage through a postulated violation of the general moral model of the social reference system,”28 while Esser and Hartung define it in terms of “the intense public communication about a real or imagined defect that is by consensus condemned, and that meets universal indignation or outrage,” and where the “defect” in question involves “some form of injury to a social norm.”29 Again, we could easily continue this list.30 Introduction: Notes on a Scandal 7 Real Subjective Creation Clearly, the bulk of the existing research treats scandals as morally determinative phenomena, that is, as functioning to reproduce alreadyestablished models of social propriety. To this end, the scholarship has effectively instituted a logical cause-effect relationship, by which the transgressive event is treated as root cause, whereas the public response— both conscious (e.g., in terms of widespread offense or even distress) and unconscious (concerning the event’s structural and psychological influence)—is understood as its “effect.” Or more precisely: while the initial event figures as “necessary cause” (or even “pre-cause”), it is the all-important publicizing of this event—its mediation/mediatization—that provides its “sufficient” causal complement.31 In any case, it is the secondary, “subjective” part of the scandal (i.e., the unsuspecting audience qua “sovereign public subject,” whose ordered existence the scandal works to maintain) that amounts to the final link in the chain. Wherefore a rudimentary order has been established in the extant scholarship—one that is in equal parts quantitative and qualitative, sequential and hierarchical—such that the scandalous subject material is systematically prioritized over and above the materiality of the scandalized subject. As already indicated, the point at which we take our leave from this now wellestablished model is, in effect, in our conception of the subject itself. Indeed, by taking this secondary, constitutive subject as the focus of our attention, we effectively turn the standard approach on its head, making its horizon our point of departure. Having said this, for practical reasons, our predominant focus will for some time not be on but rather around this subject—taking in its context and foundations—and only later will we be in a position to examine it square on. While the exact details as to how and why this is necessary will be one of the focal points of the following chapters (and to some extent, the remainder of the book), it is, all the same, important that we say one or two preliminary words here before moving on. Briefly, our interest in the subject of the scandal is tied to the awareness of a particular form of scandal that, for reasons which will become increasingly clear as we move on, we call real. We distinguish “real scandal” from “ordinary scandal” (such as the kind we encountered at the very beginning of this book) on the basis of its foundational relation to the subject; that is to say, on the view 8 Scandalous Times that, far from being “scandalized” (hence a secondary part of the process), the subject is rather what creates real scandal. In fact, the creation of scandal—or, more to the point, the scandal of creation—is, in a certain sense, the ultimate “object” of the subject, its raison d’être. Yet this fundamentally “creative” subject is, it must be said, a peculiar structure: one that stands in marked opposition to orthodox philosophical conceptions of subjectivity. For such a subject can be conceived of as neither substance, nor void point, nor invariable of presentation. Nor for that matter does it designate a register of experience, nor category of morality, nor ideological fiction. And, of course, it goes without saying that it is neither sovereign nor individual—at least, not in the classical sense. Rather, the subject we are interested in here is, in essence—and, more to the point, in form—a creative enterprise: one that presents, as a matter of course, something profoundly, even disturbingly, new. We draw this conception directly from the work of Alain Badiou, whose philosophical system in fact underpins the bulk of our scandalous investigations, and who (as indicated earlier) conceives of the subject less as a living, breathing organism than as a structure we can all, given the opportunity, enter into. Emerging only in the wake of a radical event—which we can think of for the moment as a sudden rupture with the laws of a given situation involving a surging forth of new possibilities that are as unassimilable as they are unprecedented—Badiou’s subject exceeds the human animal (qua “sovereign individual subject”) as a formal framework that unites, on the one hand, the lingering trace of this event’s occurrence, with, on the other, the gradual materialization (or the “actualization”) of the new possibilities it implied—a unification which takes the form of a new creative body. To this end, far from being something we simply are, as in the conventional Cartesian or “liberal” conception, the subject is rather something we might become, something altogether exceptional.32 Furthermore, to become a subject is to partake in a process of authentic creation, such that we can say “no creation, no subject” (and vice versa).33 In classical philosophical terms, a subject is then far more than the mere sum of its individual parts: it is ourselves (re)oriented toward a greater good (with all the ethico-philosophical resonances this term carries with it).34 As we have already indicated, it is this properly creative conception of the subject that allows us to conceptualize real scandal as something altogether Introduction: Notes on a Scandal 9 separate from ordinary scandal. Specifically, we conceive of real scandal as being the effect of a violent rupture with the order of things that results from the appearance of something radically new (and in this precise sense, real) in the world, hence, as the social consequence of an instance of real subjective creation. Or again: real scandal occurs when a public body is forced to account for the unaccountable. We can thus say that the subject “creates scandal,” and thereby causes controversy—which might similarly be understood in terms of the social affect accompanying a scandalous act—to the extent that it creates, full stop. Indeed, real subjective creation—by which we obviously mean something far rarer and more extraordinary than the superficial transformations that make up conventional “novelty”—is fundamentally and incontrovertibly scandalous, in so far as it necessarily upends the existing order: in breaking not only with what is permitted, but moreover with what is possible, it plunges the situation, for a time at least, into a state of chaos.35 All of which is to say that authentic creation, and hence authentic subjectivity, is inherently transgressive; its very being is transgression. Yet this real scandal—which, we should add in passing, equally designates the “good” form of scandal; its positive or “ideal” model—is not, for all that, the unique object of our study. Rather, our concerns lie just as much with another, far more troubling kind of scandal—one that replicates or “mimics,” at the level of both structure and effect, the chaos and disruption brought about by acts of real subjective creation, precisely in order to counteract this very process. This fundamentally negative or eliminative result is achieved in the main by overlaying the “authentically new” with its aseptic double: the pretense of creation qua simulacrum of novelty. Such scandals, which we accordingly call simulacral (and which are, in truth, anti-scandals), in effect represent the weaponization of scandal (and in particular, the controversy which surrounds it) directly in the service of the state. It is to this end that we find ourselves today increasingly bearing witness to the production of a perverse form of state-sanctioned controversy, whereby the presentation of an almost perpetual state of disorder paradoxically functions to prohibit the very possibility of real disruptive creation and the scandal it occasions, and in this way functions to maintain and even strengthen the existing order. In perverting what might otherwise be a clear signal of radical innovation—i.e., the unsettling (but no less vital) social reverberations of the great “shock of the new”36—the contemporary 10 Scandalous Times “simulacral” form of scandal has managed to wholly overcome its “real” roots to become this act’s determined enemy. If real scandals are essentially prescriptive—directing, so to speak, the proverbial “winds of change”—simulacral scandals are then contrarily proscriptive, working to neutralize both the subject and the real creation it entails, and in this way preserve and even reinforce the status quo. Thus the simulacral scandal performs the most dispiriting of functions, namely, that of extinguishing the very possibility of possibility itself. Modus Operandi It should by now be clear that our intention in this book is not merely to offer up a list of scandals that have been carefully collated according to their relative size and significance, thereby establishing a kind of obscene “catalogue of controversy.” Nor is our goal simply to present a number of in-depth analyses of scandalous exemplars, zeroing in on preeminent historical events in order to clinically dissect them and examine their inner workings (though obviously a small amount of case study will be involved here). Nor, for that matter, do we mean to confine ourselves to a specific subsection or species of scandal, such as the “political scandal,” the “financial scandal,” the “art scandal,” or the “sex scandal.” On the contrary, as noted at the outset, our interest is first and foremost philosophical, which is to say that we are principally concerned with establishing exactly what—and, crucially, why—contemporary scandal really is: not only how it works and what it does, but moreover what it truly means, both for us (individually and as a society) and, just as importantly, in-itself. More specifically, we are interested in those particular forms of scandal which are tied to processes of creation, or that have some intrinsic relation, be it positive or negative, to the idea of the new. Broadly speaking, we will go about all of this by analyzing the various functions that scandal serves in society, paying particular attention to the role of the creative subject in its production, its reception, and its ramifications. More comprehensively, our aim in examining the contemporary function of creation through the dual prisms of “scandal” and “controversy” is to show: Introduction: Notes on a Scandal 11 (1) that in disrupting the operation of the “state” (broadly conceived), the advent of the authentically new is always cause for scandal, such that we can define real scandal as the social (or “intra-situational”) effect of instances of true creation, and reciprocally (2) how the homogenizing and fundamentally “static” process of “manufacturing consent”37 is today in large part ensured through the seemingly antithetical practice of “creating controversy,” which is itself achieved via the incessant production of aseptic novelty in the form of simulacral scandals. Or in other words, we want to show how the problem of the sudden suspension of the state’s ordinary functioning as a result of real scandal (which itself arises from acts of radical creation) has directly led to its contemporary “solution” in the form of its simulacral complement, namely, the creation of state-sanctioned controversy. To this end, the book has been evenly divided into four separate parts, respectively focusing on “Scandals,” “Foundations,” “Creation,” and “Controversy.” “Part One: Scandals,” comprising the first two chapters (“The Big Reveal” and “Chaos and Novelty”), is concerned with introducing and outlining what we identify as the four generic forms of scandal that exist today, which we designate as revelatory, dissimulative, real, and simulacral (or alternatively: “sensational,” “retailing,” “original,” and “static”). Of these four, it is the last two—real/original and simulacral/static—that will come to occupy the bulk of our attention, for the related reasons that: (1) unlike their “ordinary” revelatory and dissimulative counterparts, both real and simulacral scandals are inextricably bound up with the act of creation, and (2) each necessarily (which is to say, automatically and axiomatically) concern the operation of the state itself, albeit from completely different angles, and to fundamentally different ends. “Part Two: Foundations” begins by isolating a single, all-important element as determinative (“in the last instance”) of all four forms of scandal, being none other than the nebulous category of the real, which we understand in quasi-Lacanian terms as simultaneously underlying and undermining individual and collective reality. Our effort to make sense of this outwardly “sense-less” category allows us at the same time to lay out the philosophical groundwork for our entire argument. To this end, the chapters that make up this section (“Grounds for Annulment” and “Making Sense of Everything”) detail the simultaneously creative and chaotic role the real plays first in Lacan’s 12 Scandalous Times influential “antiphilosophy,” and then, more substantially, in the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Here the real is first reformulated in terms of multiple-being before being meticulously set out to establish a complete rational ontology: an ontology whose internal stability or overall “stasis” is only guaranteed through the systematic repression of the disruptive real, the logic of which will finally be used to schematize scandal. The chapters making up “Part Three: Creation” (“A Terrible Beauty” and “Wresting with the Impossible”) venture beyond the inner confines of this “complete” ontology to explore its properly scandalous outer limits, isolating the various fault lines and impasses where the real might in effect re-enter the system and make its chaotic presence powerfully felt. This “return of the real,” which takes the form of a radical and unpredictable event, is then analyzed in terms of the tumultuous effects it can have on the situation—effects which have the potential (if not the authorization) to engender a new creative subject that might in turn lead to a real scandal surrounding the fabrication of what Badiou would call a “new universal truth.” In detailing the transgressive nature of this entire process—from the conception of multiple-being all the way up to the creation of truth—we finally show how, regardless of their radicality, such events might only indirectly give rise to real scandal, as the latter contrarily requires for its existence a crucial mediation, which is precisely the controversial work of the subject. Finally, “Part Four: Controversy,” comprising the last two chapters (“Brave New World” and “The Real Problem”), focuses on how this real subjective creation is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy. After analyzing the classic models of state repression elaborated in George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic fiction in accordance with the overarching system developed in Parts Two and Three, we turn our attention to the undisputed nonpareil of scandal at work today: social media. Here we “upgrade” Huxley’s dark vision of “universal happiness,” together with the key theses of Neil Postman’s related work on the “entertainmentization” of information in the age of television, to argue that the dominant social media essentially function as “scandalizing apparatuses.” In doing so, we focus on the polarizing president of the United States and putative “King of Twitter,”38 Donald Trump, examining the ways he both uses and is used by Introduction: Notes on a Scandal 13 different forms of static controversy. In closing, we sketch out a rudimentary “ethics of scandal” that might allow us to transcend the state of numbing satisfaction that defines our epoch and finally open us up to the chance of experiencing something which has become not only increasingly rare but even scandalous in its own right, which is nothing less than the possibility of real happiness. Notes Introduction 1 Note that we are concerned here with the philosophical study of scandal sui generis, as opposed to, say, the study of philosophical controversies, on which copious scholarship already exists. On the latter, we might consult, for example, edited collections such as Scientific and Philosophical Controversies (Lisbon: Fragmentos, 1990) or Pierluigi Barrotta and Marcelo Dascal’s Controversies and Subjectivity (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005), not to mention historically “scandalous” works such as Victor Farías’s Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) or Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998). Outside of this, we should also note how the history of philosophy is in many ways the history of controversy, from Socrates—who was of course put to death for scandalously “corrupting the young” and “not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things,” Plato, “Apology,” in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997)—up to the present day. We can equally register this controversial connection on a theoretical level. To take an obvious example, one way of conceiving of the famous dialectic, from Plato to Hegel, is precisely in terms of controversy, that is, as the process by which apparent controversies are resolved or “sublated.” Arthur Schopenhauer even develops his own “controversial dialectic” as “the branch of knowledge which treats of the obstinacy natural to man,” The Art of Controversy and Other Posthumous Papers, ed. and trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 3–4. This connection is equally recognized in the sciences, Gideon Freudenthal for example observing how “a resolution of a controversy is best exemplified by conceptual development, as a result e.g. of the differentiation or the integration of concepts. The concept of Aufhebung refers to such processes,” “Controversy,” Science in Context 11, no. 2 (1998): 159. Finally, it is worth noting how one of the peculiarities of philosophy is that once its claims altogether cease to be controversial—i.e., when a philosophical proposition is considered to have been definitively proven—it Notes 139 no longer counts as philosophy per se, but is rather understood to be something altogether different: it becomes, in effect, science. (Hence the historical progression from natural philosophy to modern science.) 2 John Thompson, Political Scandals: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (London: Polity Press, 2000), 5. 3 Thompson, Political Scandals, 5. 4 Steffen Burkhardt, “Scandals in the Network Society,” in Scandalogy: An Interdisciplinary Field, ed. André Haller, Hendrick Michael, and Martin Krauss (Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2018), 21. 5 Max Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1963): 308. 6 Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” 311. 7 Ari Adut, “A Theory of Scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar 8 Ari Adut, On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics and Art (New York: Wilde,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 1 (2005): 213. Cambridge University Press, 2008), 287. 9 Burkhardt, “Scandals in the Network Society,” 21. 10 Sigurd Allern and Ester Pollack, “Nordic Politics Scandals—Frequency, Types and Consequences,” in Mediated Scandals: Gründe, Genese und Folgeeffekte von medialer Skandalberichterstattung, ed. Mark Ludwig, Thomas Schierl, and Christian von Sikorski (Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2016), 160. 11 Pierre Schlag, “The Problem of the Subject,” Texas Law Review 69, no. 1627 (1991): 1730. 12 Antoine Arnauld in René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, ed. and trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 74. 13 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Stratchey (London: Vintage, 2001), 23. Freud is of course drawing here on the work of Georg Groddeck (who himself drew on the work of Nietzsche), who held that “the affirmation ‘I live’ is only conditionally correct, it expresses only a small and superficial part of the fundamental principle ‘Man is lived by the Es’,” The Book of the It: Psychoanalytic Letters to a Friend (New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1928), 9. 14 Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2008), 89. As Lacan points out, “the dissymmetry between Freud and Descartes is revealed […] not in the initial method of certainty grounded on the subject. It stems from the fact that the subject is ‘at home’ in this field of the unconscious”; Jacques Notes 140 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 36. 15 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 1, 150. 16 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 22. 17 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 46. 18 See for example Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 1–60; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012); Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–95; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979). 19 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 392 (emphasis added). 20 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 63. By “correlationism,” Meillassoux refers to the dominant philosophical mode of thought, inherited from Kant (and subsisting through Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre et al.), that “we can only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5), and which has accordingly led us to lose access to “the great outdoors, the eternal in-itself, whose being is indifferent to whether or not it is being thought” (63), namely, the absolute as such. 21 Note that this is not to dismiss the Cartesian model of subjectivity altogether, since it remains the template on which the contemporary subject is constructed. Hence Lacan, for example, supplements his important “return to Freud” with an equally vital “return to Descartes,” Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 133. Likewise, the model of subjectivation we will be employing here is wholly indebted to the figure of Descartes, who, together with Lacan, “paved the way for a formal theory of the subject whose basis is materialist.” Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 48. See also Badiou, Being and Event, 431–5. 22 Robert M. Entman, Scandal and Silence: Media Reponses to Presidential Misconduct (London: Polity Press, 2012), 5. To be clear, Entman qualifies this Notes 141 statement in his own work exploring how and why certain (political) misconduct becomes “scandal” while other comparable acts of malfeasance do not. Indeed, according to Entman, a key problem of much of the scholarship is precisely its “[reliance] on public outrage as a condition for scandal,” in so far as this “means omitting the instances where substantively serious misbehavior never receives sufficient publicity to stimulate a scandalized response” (Entman, Scandal and Silence, 5). Note that this does not, however, negate the fact that scandalous behavior only qualifies as a scandal to the extent that it is made public (regardless of the level of indignation attached to this publicity). 23 Molière, Tartuffe, in The Broadway Anthology of Drama: Plays from the Western Theatre Volume 1: From Antiquity through the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jennifer Wise and Craig S. Walker, trans. Richard Wilbur (Ontario: Broadway Press, 2003), 461. 24 We understand “mediatization” here not only in its “immediate” sense—i.e., as straightforwardly referring to “communication processes induced by mass media” (Burkhardt, “Scandals in the Network Society,” 22)—but also in the more active or “constructive” sense given to it in media and communication studies, as capturing “long-term interrelation processes between media change on the one hand and social and cultural change on the other.” Andreas Hepp, Stig Hjarvard, and Knut Lundby, “Mediatization—Empirical Perspectives: An Introduction to a Special Issue,” Communication 35, no. 3 (2010): 223. 25 Thompson, Political Scandals, 13. Thompson goes on to outline four alternative and often-conflicting theories of scandal—a “no-consequence theory” (where scandals are essentially conceived as media beat-ups that have little purchase on real social and political life), a “functionalist theory” (in which scandals figure as “rituals of collective absolution” (235) that ultimately function to reaffirm the status quo), a “trivialization theory” (whereby the media’s obsession with scandals lowers the tone of public discourse while marginalizing important issues), and a “subversion theory” (which contrarily holds that scandal enriches public discourse precisely by calling the status quo into question)—before advancing his own “social theory” which holds that “scandals are struggles over symbolic power in which reputation and trust are at stake” (245). 26 Thompson, Political Scandals, 13–14. 27 Adut, “A Theory of Scandal,” 213–4. 28 Burkhardt, “Scandals in the Network Society,” 20. 29 Frank Esser and Uwe Hartung, “Nazis, Pollution and No Sex: Political Scandals as a Reflection of Political Culture in Germany,” American Behavioral Scientist 47, no. 8 (2004): 1041. Notes 142 30 James Lull and Stephen Hinerman, for example, hold that scandals occur when “private acts that disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community are made public and narrativized by the media, producing a range of effects from ideological and cultural retrenchment to disruption and change,” “The Search for Scandal,” in Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, ed. James Lull and Stephen Hinerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3. For further (similar) examples, see Adut, On Scandal; Paul Apostolidis and Juliet A. Williams, “Introduction: Sex Scandals and Discourses of Power,” in Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals, ed. Paul Apostolidis and Juliet A. Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–35; Scott Basinger et al. “Preface: Counting and Classifying Congressional Scandals,” in Scandal! An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Consequences, Outcomes and Significance of Political Scandals, ed. Alison Dagnes and Mark Sachleben (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 3–28; Maria Jose Canel and Karen Sanders, Morality Tales: Political Scandals and Journalism in Britain and Spain in the 1990s (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006); Entman, Scandal and Silence; John Garrard, “Scandals: An Overview,” in Scandals in Past and Contemporary Politics, ed. John Garrard and James L. Newell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 12–29; Hinda Mandell and Gina Masullo Chen, “Introduction: Scandal in an Age of Likes, Selfies, Retweets and Sexts,” in Scandal in a Digital Age, ed. Hinda Mandell and Gina Masullo Chen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3–14; and Howard Tumber and Silvio R. Waisbord, “Introduction: Political Scandals and Media across Democracies, Volume II,” American Behavioral Scientist 47, no. 9 (2004): 1043–52. Note that none of these characterizations of scandal are far removed from its “legal” definition as “disgraceful, shameful, or degrading acts or conduct that brings about disgrace or offends the moral sensibilities of society” (“Scandal Law and Legal Definition,” USLegal, https:// definitions.uslegal.com/s/scandal/, accessed 27 November 2018). 31 It is, of course, this notion of sufficient causation that allows us to conclude that actual transgression lies in irremediable excess over scandal. Or as Theodore J. Lowi puts it (with regard to specifically political scandals): “Corruption is a constant and scandal is a variable,” “Power and Corruption: Political Competition and the Scandal Market,” in Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals, ed. Paul Apostolidis and Juliet A. Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 70. 32 Indeed, according to Badiou, the subject essentially constitutes a “forced exception,” Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 88. Notes 143 33 As suggested above, Badiou’s subject represents the logical continuation of the great twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century process of desubjectivization, not least concerning Sartre’s famous contention that “existence precedes essence” and Lacan’s equation of the subject with a “lack-of-being.” See for example Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 100. 34 “The Good” of course constitutes one of the central ideas of classical philosophy after Plato, who recognized that “what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the good,” Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Alan Bloom (New York: HarperCollins), 189 (508e). Badiou himself explicitly aligns his own key concept of “truth”—toward which the subject aims, and around which the entirety of his philosophy is constructed—with “the Good,” even going so far as to substitute the latter with the former in his “hyper-translation” of Plato’s work. See Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters, trans. Suzan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), xxxiv; and Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 105–6. 35 Needless to say, exactly how “dramatically realized” this chaotic state will be is going to vary considerably: while a real political invention may well lead to sensational scenes of public tumult, a new scientific theory is likely to introduce a far more measured—though no less absolute—form of (predominantly “intellectual”) chaos. 36 Cf. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), 6. The scandal’s historical relation to radical creation is, for obvious reasons, most immediately recognizable in the field of art where, as Guy Debord observes, “True artistic activity […] appears in the form of scandal,” “Situationist Manifesto,” in 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, ed. Alex Danchev (London: Penguin, 2011): 349. 37 Cf. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002). As Herman and Chomsky (lix) point out, this phrase—which the authors do not actually employ themselves—has its origins in the work of Walter Lippmann, who described the operation of propaganda in terms of “the manufacture of consent,” Public Opinion (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 248. 38 Kerry Sanders, “Donald Trump: The King of Twitter?” NBC News, March 15, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-kingtwitter-n539131 (accessed 27 November 2018).