RUMORS IN THE AGE OF THEIR TECHNICAL REPRODUCTION

Like fighting shadows - a contribution from Mladen Dolar

Welcome to the desert of the real!

If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence.

Below, a brilliant contribution from Mladen Dolar, the third member of the Ljubljana Lacanian troika.

(Still from Orson Welles’ 1962 film The Trial is based on Franz Kafka’s novel of the same name)

When Socrates was standing in front of the Athenian tribunal in 399 BCE, this is what he said at the beginning of his defense:

There have been many who have accused me to you for many years now, and none of their accusations are true. These I fear much more than I fear Anytus and his friends [the present and identifiable accusers] … Those who spread the rumors, gentlemen, are my dangerous accusers … Moreover, these accusers are numerous, and have been at it a long time … What is most absurd in all this is that one cannot even know or mention their names … Those who maliciously and slanderously persuaded you … all those are most difficult to deal with: one cannot bring one of them into court or refute him; one must simply fight with shadows, as it were, in making one’s defense, and cross-examine when no one answers. … Very well then. I must surely defend myself and attempt to uproot from your minds in so short a time the slander that has resided there so long. (Apology, 18b-19a)

The situation is exemplary, it iconically stands at the very beginning of philosophy: Socrates, who fought the false opinions and beliefs and promoted knowledge as the way to truth based on logos more than anyone else in history, to the point that he became the model and the beacon of this struggle, this same Socrates was powerless against the power of rumors that have been spreading against him for many years and had no basis whatsoever, yet they resulted in the indictment, the trial, the sentence and death. He could have easily fought the visible opponents, but the ones he couldn’t contest were the invisible ones who paved the way for the visible ones. It’s like fighting shadows, but shadows won in the end. – Let’s say that logos is the early Greek name for what Lacan, 2500 years later, would call the big Other, in the sense of the guarantee of knowledge in its universal validity and in its binding character. Logos is the authority we all have to assume when aiming at knowledge and truth. In a maximum opposition to this, there is like another face of the big Other, epitomized by rumors, based on thin air, erratic and fickle, yet producing serious effects, efficient in spite of, or maybe because of, its lack of foundation. Rumors have no ascertainable origin and no verifiable content, nobody quite subscribes to them, one just hears them and passes them on, as a relay. ‘Rumor has it’, as the phrase goes, and maybe one should take it literally, ‘the rumor has IT’, oddly indicating that rumors may indeed have to do with the Freudian It (should one suggest ‘rumor has id’? or propose a title ‘rumors and their relation to the unconscious’?). In rumors it is as if ‘it speaks’, not us. It is as if the big Other presented two different faces, with no common measure, the face of logos and the buzz of rumors – shall we say the big Other and its double? The big Other and its shadow? The big Other and its symptom?

In the situation of Socrates before the court, the other face of the big Other, based on rumors, hearsay and slander, got the upper hand over its glorious face of logos, truth and epistemology. Logos was helpless against rumors, the faceless anonymous avalanche won against the best of arguments. This is a vintage case: the other big Other turned out to be more powerful than the official and celebrated one; rumors, trivial and unfounded as they are, have the capacity to outwit logos, which seems to be no match for them, and even the wisest of men (according to the Delphic oracle) had to concede defeat. This story stands at the very origin of philosophy, rumors appear as the philosophy’s other, an indomitable creature capable of defeating the best of arguments. The story has the value of a parable extending to present times.

There are many twists and turns in the long history of this parable. Concerning the speed of spreading and the reach of rumors, there is an ironic shift that qualifies modernity. In premodern times rumors were basically spreading by word of mouth while with advent of modernity they attained a whole different level with the possibility of mass reproduction and circulation. Let’s say that reason, the great slogan of the enlightenment, was the modern version of the big Other of logos, with the resolute trust in its powers and its unstoppable progress, supported by science, extended by massive technological advances, the idea of a democratic social order, economic rationality, the prospect of freedom and prosperity, sweeping away the false traditional authorities in order to install the rule of the true big Other of reason, science and democracy. Yet, doesn’t the entire subsequent history of modernity look like a long story of waning, decline, downfall of this big Other, and the resurgence of its shadow?