Scandalous Times

Contemporary Creativity and the Rise of State-Sanctioned Controversy

Alex Ling

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350068575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in 'revelatory' terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, 'truth'. Otherswill be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet these 'ordinary' scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamental-and fundamentally rare-form of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such 'real scandal', but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy. From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this 'static' fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.

Part One

Scandals

1

The Big Reveal

Clearly one of the central concerns of this book is the way that scandals have come to exert an enormous influence over our everyday lives, affecting our thoughts and actions to a degree that is both difficult and dangerous to ignore. Indeed, key to their overall “effectiveness” is the extraordinary familiarity and even intimacy of their operation. They impress themselves upon us, telling us how and how not to act, what to do and say, even what to think and feel. More and more, it is the scandal that affirms our place in the world: Are we for or against? Do we resent or approve? Is it “us” or is it “them”?

The routine, insistent nature of these scandalous impressions and affirmations is at once remarkable and plain to see. To open a newspaper is, after all, to be confronted with story after story demanding either approval or condemnation—an endless succession of calculated polemy which is in no way restricted to editorials and political analysis, but equally comprises business news, sports coverage, food and entertainment reviews, art criticism, science reporting, even fashion advice.

Much of this either takes its cue or is simply lifted whole from the increasingly caustic world of social media—doubtless the arch-scandalizing technological development of the twenty-first century—which, in providing both a literal and metaphorical platform for society’s collective “id,” has in all likelihood done more to split the human race into warring camps than anything the world has seen in a substantially long time.

All of this is of course to say nothing of politics itself, whose scandalous bona fides are as incontestable as they are self-evident. Suffice for us to point to the paragon of anti-virtue that is the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald Trump, whose almost caricaturishly scandalous actions—his shady business dealings, his disregard if not outright disdain for ethical norms, his indisputable racism and misogyny (both public and private), his bellicose tweets, his blatant lies and schoolyard bullying tactics, etc.—only serve to further drive a wedge between his supporters and his detractors, effectively informing each side of what they need to condemn absolutely and what must be defended at all costs.

Now, the reasoning behind all of this is, at least on the face of it, fairly straightforward. Part of the function of scandal is, after all, to polarize—in effect, to “divide and conquer”—and the ones who best employ it, those who have, either willingly or unwillingly, been awarded the title of “celebrity” (in which we should hear both the Old French celebrité or “celebration” and the Latin celebritas, meaning “multitude” or “throng”)¹ know this only too well.²

Moreover, looking beyond their superficially confronting nature, it is important to acknowledge the paradoxically reassuring effect these polarizing divisions have on us, the way they can imbue us with an intense sense of comfort and self-satisfaction. In point of fact, it is precisely this gratifying affect that makes the scandal one of the most powerful tools in the celebrity’s already-considerable arsenal. After all, what could be more rewarding than recognizing yourself—i.e., your “true” self: your deepest beliefs and heartfelt convictions—in (or, alternatively, in sharp contrast to) the actions of some “celebrated” individual whose existence has been deemed infinitely worthier than your own?

That being said, we needn’t judge ourselves too harshly here, if only for the fact that this whole affirmatory process is, more often than not, something that we only barely register, let alone have any real control over. For when first confronted with a scandal, our immediate, almost automatic reaction is hardly to carefully consider its “objective” nature (its context and defining terms, its determination as much as its possible ramifications …). Rather, it is to crudely assess its relation to ourselves: does it “represent” us and our worldview or, contrarily, does it offend our sensibilities?³

Our subsequent “rational” response is then oriented and shaped by this initial, “reflexive” (understood in both the physiological and referential senses of the word) assessment. Indeed, it is important to stress here how it is only after we have established our own rudimentary relation to the scandal that we might so much as begin to take stock of its broader picture. And it almost goes without saying that this ensuing account, while doubtless more considered, is nonetheless going to be deeply colored by the preceding spontaneous (or “in-considerate”) evaluation.⁴ All of which is finally to say that, when it comes to scandals, first impressions really do count.

Anagnorisis and Peripeteia

It would seem then that there is a protocol proper to the scandal, which is that they must address us before we can address them. Moreover, we also recognize that there is a certain “immediate” (meaning both instantaneous and unmediated) unconscious pleasure we take in this address: a personal gratification which lies in our initial identification or rejection, in the manner by which it re-establishes the terms on which our own identity is at once constructed and instructed (does it reflect “us,” or rather, does it reflect “them”?).

Yet the satisfaction we enjoy here is by no means limited to the ways in which the scandal structures and reinforces our worldview. To the contrary, far from being confined to this initial, fundamentally narcissistic level, the comfort we find in the scandal is arguably derived for the most part from its deeply felt, seemingly incontestable, authenticity.

Once again, the logic here is fairly clear and straightforward. In effect, the transgressive nature of scandals leads us to understand them in “revelatory” terms, that is, as being direct exposures of the real itself—as the sudden “revelation of a little bit of the real.”⁵ In this age of public relations absolutism and around-the-clock “image management,” the scandal appears to offer us a tantalizing glimpse of what really goes on, cutting through the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, “truth.” (This disclosive function is especially pronounced in the case of politics, where the scandal is generally supposed to expose “the ‘hidden face’ of power” and in this way “bring out the duality that underlies political life: the gap between what is said and what things are, between idealized politics and down-and-dirty politics, between the norms that are publicly legitimated and upheld and actual behavior.”)⁶

In any event, these sudden disclosures are then further subjected to the same logic of mediatization and sensationalism that informs our epoch as a whole. Played out before the public eye with all the spectacle and emotional intensity of the best-scripted dramas, the revelatory scandal evokes as much the multiple plot twists and dramatic reveals of contemporary fiction as the anagnorisis and peripeteia of ancient tragedy⁷—thus giving the fullest expression to the notion of its representing “a drama of concealment and exposure.”⁸

At the time of writing, two such revelatory scandals dominate the headlines: the so-called college-admissions bribery scandal, where a group of wealthy parents (including Hollywood actors, corporate CEOs, and the like) stand accused of buying their underperforming children’s way into prestigious American tertiary institutions such as Yale and Stanford, to the tune of 25 million dollars and the multiple trials and sentencings of the long-time DC lobbyist and erstwhile chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, Paul Manafort.

That each of these scandals should induce a considerable emotional investment on the part of their “audience” relates not only to their representing peripeteic “reversals of fortune” for the key protagonists, who have themselves come to embody especially rancorous positions in the eyes of an intensely divided American public (the “liberal Hollywood elite” in the case of the college-admissions scandal and the “unscrupulous political opportunist” in the case of Manafort). Moreover, our engrossment derives from their anagnoristic function, from the fact that they each appear to expose (albeit from different angles), both for the public and for the scandalous “actors” themselves, the same tragic truth about the way that wealth and power operate in the United States—a country that invests heavily in the myth of “meritocracy” (and in particular in the fabled “American dream” of equal opportunity and upward mobility)—which is, of course, that the game has been rigged from the very start.⁹

Yet this “of course” leads us to ask ourselves: what exactly is so revealing about these revelations? The number of scandals that have already come and gone and, in the process, exposed the manifold ways by which the global aristocracy perpetuates its own privileged status through brazen acts of lying, cheating, and outright exploitation is simply too large to count. Indeed, it has been public knowledge for decades that admission processes at many elite universities are deeply inequitable and geared toward the rich and powerful.¹⁰ Likewise, few can be surprised to hear of Manafort’s historical criminal practices (including tax and bank fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, foreign-lobbying violations, and obstruction of justice), acts of corruption that the general public—regardless of its ingrained meritocratic beliefs—takes for granted as occurring at the highest levels each and every day.

To be sure, much of the pleasure we take in these “revelations” would appear to come not from the ostensibly “new” information they provide, but rather from the way they reinforce already-established knowledge, things that we have long been aware of, on one level or another. After all, who, today, is unaware of the fact that the scales are—and always have been—heavily slanted in favor of the already-fortunate? And who, for that matter, could fail to recognize that power and corruption so often go hand in hand?

From Revelation to Dissimulation

Yet we also revel in the banality—in the rank ordinariness—of these scandalous events and, in particular, in the remarkable degree of insouciance and nonchalance the protagonists frequently bring to their activities. So much is this the case that, in a decidedly “meta” turn of events, the very process of recognizing this fact has become a marked feature of the way that scandals are both reported and commented upon. To take a single representative example: discussing the college-admissions scandal in The New Yorker, journalist Naomi Fry initially “wondered why perusing the minute interactions between [principal fraudster William] Singer and his clients gave me so much pleasure,” before identifying the cause as “the sheer everydayness of the documented conversations, whose polite blandness, in the context of their apparent criminality, often led to high comedy.”¹¹ (Fry then goes on to relate this to the “similar satisfaction” she experienced on first reading of Donald Trump Jr’s “I love it” email response that led to the infamous “Trump Tower meeting”—attended by, among others, Paul Manafort.)¹²

Of course, this pleasurable banality need not always be made explicit, but can equally (and just as effectively) be inferred. To report on Trump’s latest outrageous assertion or controversial tweet is, for example, equally to underscore—regardless of the intentionality behind this (or the degree to which the journalist ideologically supports or opposes the president)—both his mediocrity and his triviality, for the simple reason that these acts bely a life immersed in the duties of office and speak instead to an irresponsible obsession with television, and with Fox News in particular (to which his tweets and assertions frequently serve as real-time responses).

Needless to say, the banality that often accompanies scandals equally extends to the simple fact that we have experienced the very same thing countless times before, just as we will again in the future. To be sure, regardless of how incendiary both the college-admissions and the Manafort scandals may appear at the time of writing, the odds are high that, by the time of this book’s publication, they will have been largely forgotten, having long ago been buried beneath mound upon mound of fresh controversy, the detritus of a thousand and more almost-identical cases that have come and gone in the intervening period.

All of which inevitably leads us to question not only the originality but, moreover, the very authenticity of such scandals: the simple idea that they present us with “the truth and nothing but the truth.” For as enticing as they may be, we can of course equally contend that so many of these increasingly routine transgressions present nothing other than the strategic face of contemporary capitalism: calculated marketing exercises designed to stimulate consumer interest and generate increased revenue, such controversies arguably do little more than attest to the contemporary truism that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

This fundamentally commercial logic is, for obvious reasons, especially apparent in mainstream broadcast and digital media: from the studied pugnacity and invective of radio shock jocks, to the ever-increasing supplementation of news reporting with a relentless stream of turgid commentary in the form of fatuous “hot takes” and reliably contentious roundtables (which, in disguising opinion as journalism, only serve to further erode the already problematic distinction between “editorializing” and “reporting”). Here, the dual logics of scandal and capital—or in traditional publishing terms: of “editorial” and “marketing”—perfectly coalesce in the never-ending pursuit of greater audience share or “traffic,” the measure of which is provided in the form of “ratings” and “clicks” (or “likes” or “shares” …), which will then finally be parlayed into advertising revenue.

The same underlying logic of course equally applies to the participatory and accordingly self-promotional world of social media, where the principal unit of quantification becomes that of “followers,” and where “marketing is no longer a separate function from editorial—the editorial is the marketing.”¹³ Yet in cultivating the transformation of individuals into so-called personal brands, social media goes one step further than its more traditional counterpart, by not only facilitating but actively encouraging a practice of self-scandalizing (a practice which, regardless of its superficially devaluing effects, is clearly pecuniary in intent).

While we could easily cite myriad examples of this process (of which the now-clichéd “celebrity sex tape” is perhaps the most well known), its perfect distillation is arguably found in the carefully choreographed and drawn-out spectacle of the moder...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Notes on a Scandal
• Part 1: Scandals
• Part 2: Foundations
• Part 3: Creation
• Part 4: Controversy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint