paris and the law

Music: Cocteau Twins: Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)

This morning my feisty, 87-year old neighbor phoned to tell me that she has a nasty leak on her side of the condo, and it's got to be my restaurant style coffee maker that I had installed when I moved in. I said I doubted it was the coffee maker, which runs into the line for the fridge's icemaker. It's more likely the plumbing in the wall. Regardless, she implied I'd be replacing her spoiled carpet and moldy walls . . . which, I will do, of course, if it's my problem. So here we wait for the plumber as I think about how all that money I'm making for teaching summer school will go directly into my neighbor's new carpet installation.

Anyhoo, speaking of (private-cum-public) plumbing: Paris Hilton is going to jail! In my book, nothing makes a celebrity hottie hotter than an orange jumpsuit and shackles! As Paris would say, "that's HAWT!" It's been sorta interesting watching news coverage of this "event"---shots of a poised and impeccably dressed Paris, jumpcut to embittered bystander who snidely remarks "it serves her right! She's not above the law, why should she get special treatment?!?!?!" Hilton's lawyer said that the judges 45 day sentence was "ludicrous," explaining that prior to Hilton's sentence the judge was not imposing jail time for the non-violent offender whose time would be 90 days or less. He argued, like Martha, Paris was being singled out because of her celebrity.

Anyone who does not believe Paris was singled out because of her celebrity is a hypocrite; celebrities are singled-out by default; there is no appropriate way to deal with a celebrity in a high-profile case. The judge was marked for praise or blame either way he went with this.

Anyhoo, I've always been a fascinated by and a fan of Hilton for reasons that I cannot quite explain (I think it's her lazy eyelid, the objet a that, as Mick Jaggar might say, starts me up). And while I do, on some level, understand the glee with which reporters and "experts" applaud the sentence, something reeks of contradiction, of mendacity. The "she's not above the law" snipe of the smugly vengeful seems to ignore the fact that celebrity is defined in related terms: celebrities exceed the norm. However rightly or wrongly, celebrities are elevated personalities, phallic things that betoken the Law yet are immune to its power in an unusual way. By "Law" here I don't necessarily mean the state laws that Paris violated, but the regulatory logic of representation as such—the logic that imposes the prohibition. Celebrities by definition are not prohibited as much as a consequence of publicity; the trade-off of celebrity is access to a public or counterpublic in exchange for being policed. That is, one is allowed to transgress in exchange for giving up information---the data of a personal, "private" life.

Y'all know where this is going, so why not just drop the L-bombs: For Lacan, the Law "is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language. For without kinship nominations, no power is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that bind and weave the yarn of lineage through succeeding generations." The "name-of-the-father" institutes "the Law" as a prohibition: "don't touch that or it will fall off" (with nods to Laura), or "no, you cannot have that," or "no, you must piss in this hole, not your pants," "no, mommy is for me," and so on. That is, the legal order (and by extension the political) is "always-already" or instantaneously a linguistic one, tied to human speech. The idea here is that the state law as we understand it ("don't drink and drive" and "don't drive without a license") is "later" development of language/prohibition tied necessarily to the first injunction we comprehend as subjects: "No!"

When "the Law" is understood in this Lacanian (or even Burkean) sense, then the cry of the smug bystander---"Paris is not above the law!"---is not really the case. Of course she must "obey the same laws we do," as I heard another person say on television (!!!), but in reality all celebrities are given a "pass," a permission to transgress. Part of the reason celebrities are fun to watch and read about is that they get to transgress for us, and this is pleasurable (it's the same appeal of becoming a rock star, in a way). Paris' nightclubbing, open-access to all things money can buy (as well as her open access for certain others to her you know what), all the filthy "swag" that's thrown at her, and so on, allows us to vicarious experience the excess of transgressing the law. (So, too, is this the same logic of enjoyment that many felt working in their support of GWB as Master-Daddy of West, immune to international will, a righteous trangressor!) For Paris, the price for her access was paid, of course, with all those sex tapes; the homage of the price paid for celebrity is obvious lampooned in the sculpture above (click the image for the full story). Nevertheless, insofar as the injunction as such is the origin of desire, our pleasure in Paris' celebrity is a safe way get excessive voyeuristically. And when we celebrate her incarceration, it's a vicarious daddy-move---we get to play Father; the most common way we deal with the trauma of our entry into the symbolic is to repeat the initiation for others. In this respect scapegoating or projective identification is merely the echo of anOther primal scene. Celebrating celebrity incarceration betokens a cycle of ab-using---etymologically meaning, of course, to "use something/one at a distance" for one's own gratification.

I guess, then, the problem with the life of a celebrity is that you must both transgress for others as well as suffer their condemnations. Jebus taught us this, right? So you have to figure out ways to transgress and enjoy excess in ways that are both spectacular but not infantile. So yes, that's what I'm saying folks: Paris is Jesus, or bigger than Jesus, or something like that. Except that I cannot figure out what aspect of Christ was infantile, what child-like thing he did to invite such rage (oh yea, I forgot: he was innocent . . sinlessly innocent, and in that sense, divinely redundant).