on gossip
Music: Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson: Angels of the Universe (2001)
I cannot help myself; I rationalize after "it" exits, this "it" that goes on to circulate like a beautiful accident, sometimes the name of an obsolete scholar who has, as Michael Stipe once sang, "said it up; said too much," sometimes the deed of another who cannot help herself either. But always at the core of that self-same conference speaker there is an identifiable body and a voice goes from it, from me, as well as the delusion that this "it" can somehow be controlled for meaning, purpose, representation.
"What I say goes," muses Steven Conner, "for you, [my voice] comes from me. For me, it goes out from me. Between this coming from and going towards lie all the problems and astonishments of the dissociated voice." The problem is gossip. The astonishment of this post is coming to terms with the fact that I am one. The catalysts to my gifts of the tongue, my charismata, are bourbon, exhaustion, and the inescapable desire to connect with other bodies. In some sense gossip is an answer to the question of desire, "Che Vuoi?", because it is always about another, a third party, and an attempt to mediate with the Other as an immediate interlocutor. Would you like me to be the knowing one? Very well then, I can produce the nugget.
What is curious about admitting one is a gossip is the etymology of the term, which is a noun: "One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism," says the OED, again, a mediation (this time, in terms of The Angel). In Lacan-o-babble, over the course of some four centuries the position of the gossip seems to have shifted from something closer to the analyst's discourse to that of the university discourse (I think we would be in error to describe the contemporary gossip as party to the hysteric's discourse, insofar as the secret knowledge of the gossip is about justifying the gossip's existence as such, whereas the knowledge of hysteria is the source of jouissance). I'm not so sure this distinction is all that helpful except for pointing out that in either case---then or now---the gossip claims to represent another party (whereas the hysteric demands knowledge): then, the dialogue partner for The Angel; now, some absent other for whomever one is speaking to. Let us term the gossip of old the Godparent, and that of today the Circulator. What does the difference tell us (tell me?)
Obviously the difference represents the ravages of secularization, a shift in the way in which folks forge representatives of the Big O. Previously the Godparent and the baptized were subservient to some larger divine. The Circulator, however, is subservient to knowledge, is a node in a network, what Avital Ronell terms a "human switchboard": precisely when one has succumbed to the delusion of self-transparency and control, the secret knowledge comes out with a vengeance, as if one is speaking in tongues. In a sense, the contemporary gossip, the Circulator, unwittingly lets The Angel in. It is a prophecy of sorts---but almost universally a prophecy we both enjoy and despise.
Why despise? Because, of course, gossip---like speech---is associated with body, earth, woman. Babble, speaking in tongues, speech as such.
Reflecting still on the academic conference of last week, I continue to feel guilt for having become at many moments a Circulator---as were we all, to greater or lesser degrees. This is how a culture is sustained. And we are foolish to think we are in control of the culture; it would seem it is quite the other way about. As a thing or a verb, gossip sustains our the culture of Communication Studies as an ecology, a multi-noded environment, a kind of gaze- and projection-zone that all cultures that sustain the academic discourse require. There is no academy without gossip; and there is really no knowledge without our unwitting theological prostrations.