Read an Excerpt
Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses
READING SCANDALOUS TEXTS
By Jeremiah L. Alberg
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013 Jeremiah L. Alberg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-076-4
Chapter One
The Language of Scandal and the Scandal of Language
Leontius and the Corpses
Let's begin by looking more carefully at the surface of the episode from the Republic in which Leontius desires to both look and not look at the executed corpses he is passing by. This encounter is decidedly not a psychological conflict of desires. His desire to look at the corpses and not to look is not like my desire both to eat chocolate cake and not eat it, since I am on a diet. In the latter case either act has its pros and its cons. The chocolate cake will taste good; it may even taste all the better, being the "guilty pleasure" that it is. It will satisfy my hunger, but it will also leave me feeling like a failure and will contribute to my weight gain. Not eating will leave me hungry but also happy that I was able to control my appetite. I will not gain weight and might even lose a pound. When Leontius desires both to look and not to look, he cannot say what looking will do for him nor what not looking will deprive him of. The chocolate cake does not both attract and repulse me; instead, the cake and the diet appeal to two distinct goals: satisfying hunger versus controlling my appetite. The corpses attract and repulse in equal measure because they appeal to one goal: the "real workings of society" in Danner's formulation, the "truth of the victim" in mine.
So Leontius's encounter with the corpses is not exactly akin to "rubbernecking" as one drives by the scene of a traffic accident. Something else is going on here. Without pressing too hard on this short incident, we can pay attention to details we might have missed. First, the corpses are there not as the result of some accident but rather due to a state execution. Plato is saying that if one goes up from the Piraeus, with all of its significations as the site of this famous dialogue, one will come across things—executed corpses—that will trip one up. One will recognize what these kind of things are because they will have the peculiar effect of both attracting and repulsing. According to Plato, this kind of encounter is both harmful to the soul and the price one pays for practicing politics.
Second, Leontius's interior struggle is resolved by his giving in to the disgusting desire in the hope that the disgust itself will finally outweigh the desire, and so the latter will somehow not show itself again. What is it that Leontius wants to see? How is it that the corpses seem to beckon Leontius's gaze? A look at the victims of violence seems to promise access to some deeper mystery, yet Leontius also knows that simply gazing at the corpses will tell him nothing. Still, he cannot look away.
Plato, through the figure of Socrates, suggests that we should not look directly at the victim, even as he acknowledges that the victim at least seems to promise us a deeper, darker knowledge. To be a good citizen is to use the spirited part of the soul, anger in fact, to curb these kinds of desires and let the rational part rule, which means not only that this form of rationality cannot take in the victim but that it depends upon anger to function properly.
All of this is true but it could be that Plato has more to tell us. The story that Socrates says he trusts is oft en read as a story of a struggle interior to the soul of the individual Leontius. He seems to be struggling with himself about a desire to look at a disgusting sight. Is this a sufficient understanding?
Leontius says, in fact, and this is the third point, that he "saw the executioner with some corpses beside him." That is, Leontius saw more than the corpses. In a story like this, we do well to assume that every detail is there for a reason. We do even better to assume that any detail we and others habitually pass over probably has some significance. No one comments on the presence of the executioner. In the text he is called "he who belongs to the people." Now there are many interpretations that we could attempt here, all of them highly speculative. Plato suggests by his inclusion of the figure of the executioner in this story that the interpersonal dimension is critical—especially in situations like Leontius's that appear to be purely internal struggles.
Leontius longs to look and is disgusted with himself for longing. We sense that the more disgusted he is with himself, the stronger his urge to look; and, of course, the stronger his urge, the greater his disgust. Somehow the longing and the disgust mutually reinforce each other. This kind of encounter is a good example of what I mean when I use the word "scandal" and its cognates in this book. A scandal is an event that simultaneously attracts and repels us. A scandal is able to attract us precisely to the degree that it repels us and vice versa.
An essential element in scandal, beyond the struggle internal to an individual, is the interpersonal dimension between the man who belongs to the people and Leontius, the man who seems to want to belong to himself and fails. At this point we might even say that this is a hidden rivalry that constitutes the scandal.
A deeper understanding of the conflicted desire to see the corpses at the foot of the executioner will help us understand what it is we see when we look there. It will help us, then, to see beneath the surface of the corpses. The desire to look and not to look can be described as scandalous, and it is this conflicted desire that constitutes the sight itself as scandalous. But the desire is not conflicted "in itself," as it were. The conflict is always between persons. The desire is conflicted because a model is somehow communicating to the subject both "Look!" and "Turn away!" Although the word "scandal" is not Plato's, coming as it does from a strictly biblical provenance, it still seems to capture well what the episode illustrates.
Plato is aware of the deep pull that the scandalous vision of the victim exerts on our consciousness. I think he is even vaguely aware that this pull indicates the central role that this particular scandalous vision of the corpse plays in the formation of human consciousness, in our uncanny desire both to see and not see when it comes to violence in our world. He also gives us a warning that we would ignore at our peril: the desire to look at that scene can produce, if not insanity, at least a spasm of madness. How else can one construe the words that Leontius addresses to his own eyes, "Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight." This suggests a need either to master the desire, as Leontius could not, or to form our vision in such a way that it can bear the sight of the victim without scandal. I am suggesting that the only way that the latter can occur is by comprehending more deeply the rivalrous relationship that gives birth to the conflicted desire.
The thesis that guides this investigation includes a general definition of scandal in terms of a mediator who promises access to something and, at the same time, blocks it. Then we look at how scandal inheres in language itself and how it generates a kind of meaning. Language is the most human phenomenon; by which I mean most humans spend a great deal of time holding conversations, listening to lectures, watching movies with dialogue, or reading books, and animals do not. Thus, it is an anthropological phenomenon. From this fundamental, anthropological level we will be able to move to other ways that scandal affects us in interpreting texts, art, and, indeed, life itself.
Scandal, Rivalry, and Idolatry
We all know, even if we might not be able to formulate it in an exact definition, what the word "scandal" means. We see it used daily on the news and in the papers. In all that follows, I do not want to lose sight of this preunderstanding. It forms the background to our way of thinking about these things, and, if that way is to change, the pre-understanding needs to be made more conscious. Precisely because my thesis may seem quite divorced from our everyday understanding of scandal, I want to show that it is, in fact, deeply related to it.
Scandal is difficult to define because it is never univocal. It always refers both to the scandalizing event—the Watergate scandal—and to the scandalized reaction of the public—the nation's shock at Nixon's abuse of power. Clearly the two references are related, yet they remain distinguishable. Beyond both the event and the reaction is the rivalry, usually hidden, that transforms a crime into a scandal. Scandals proliferate in our society because rivalry has proliferated. A rivalrous consciousness is prone to scandal, and scandal forms the consciousness.
Scandal occurs when someone simultaneously blocks access to something that he has also designated as desirable. In order for this to occur, in other words, in order that one person can in his or her relation with another person both offer and block access to something, there has to be a rivalry between the two. By rivalry I mean not just simple competition but a relationship that consists in the kind of admiration that makes the one want to have what the other has, that makes the one want to be like the other, and, simultaneously, in the kind of envy that makes the one hate the other for having what she has and for being who she is. When envy and rivalry move to the level at which a person can be envious of the other for who he or she is, then we have a situation that can be called idolatry. Idolatry is defined as giving power over oneself to another who otherwise would not possess that power. To want to be another person is to want the being of the other and to think that somehow that person could bestow it. Thus, the one to whom the power has been accorded to both grant and deny access to this being is the one who is able to scandalize; he or she is the skandalon, the idol.
My thesis is that revealing the rivalry and idolatry that underlie the scandal uncovers a way of forgiving the rivalry and idolatry so that the scandal becomes a bridge to deeper understanding. I want to apply this to the way that we read. Everyone can point to scandalous texts that off end, upset, or shock; and everyone can point to so-called prudes who are off ended, upset, or shocked by texts that may or may not be in and of themselves scandalous. It is rare, however, for an interpreter to recognize the rivalry represented in the text that underlies the scandal.
Scandal is defined here in a way that makes clear its essentially interpersonal character. Although we oft en speak of scandal as if it were a thing out there, and although we talk about scandals as if they did not involve our own reactions to them, this is misleading because scandals depend upon rivalry for their existence. On the other hand, if we played a word-association game with "scandal," I doubt that the words "access" and "block" would come up, and so in this sense my definition does not correspond immediately to our everyday use.
Nevertheless, I think that this definition does include our everyday use of the word in that the scandals regularly reported in the news—e.g., clerical sexual abuse of minors, bishops covering up the abuse, politicians accepting bribes—involve a kind of promise of access and then a blocking of what has been promised.
The "promised" aspect of the phenomenon points to the relation between the office holder, for example, and the public. The public invests the former with the power to bring certain symbolic realities into existence. The failure to do so need not be scandalous; it could be merely disappointing. It becomes offensive only when there is also an element of rivalry between the holder of the office and the public so that the public can see itself as the "victim" of an abuse of power or of the privilege that comes with the office. In other words, only when the public can see themselves, or someone very like themselves, as holding the office does scandal become possible. This helps us to understand the otherwise perplexing phenomenon of proliferating scandal in an era and culture of lessening taboos. It is more and more difficult to genuinely shock the public by some outrageous act, and there are fewer and fewer social taboos to violate. Scandals nevertheless increase more and more because everyone becomes the rival to everyone else.
When a man or woman in public office does something that contravenes what the office symbolizes, the promised access to a value-laden reality is, in fact, blocked or obstructed by the behavior. Th at which is supposed to be brought near is actually pushed further away, but what drives the scandal is the secret thought, "I could do it better." It would seem as though the stronger the symbolic nature of the office—for example, the President of the United States versus the mayor of Detroit, or a cardinal of the Catholic Church versus a parish priest—and the more egregious the offense, the greater the scandal would be, but this is to ignore the crucial interpersonal dimension in favor of a more "objective" view. If the world were so structured that a person could never imagine being royalty, then the misbehavior of the royals would not scandalize that person. But when the distance between commoners and royalty is decreased but not abolished, any infraction of the social order is seen as scandalous. We are most scandalized by those whom we most rival, by those whom we would most like to be. Moreover, in a perverse twist, scandal itself activates and generates rivalry, whereas before there was merely disinterest or indifference.
The "promise of access" is another way of saying that scandal has a seductive side. The public does not invest by accident this power in an office or the person occupying it. Good politicians use this kind of promise to attract followers. The blocking of the access that has been promised means that scandal is also always a bit of a shock. Further, it is precisely the distancing of what seemed to be offered that fans the desire. The dialectic of proffered and refused access gives scandal its particular quality of brandishing something attractive and always keeping it just out of reach. It accounts then for scandal's continual ability to fascinate.
Language as Scandalous
Although there is no lack of scandal in our world, it may still strike some as a secondary phenomenon, relegated for the most part to the edges of respectability. There is some truth in this. Our news media are not filled with scandals from one end to another. It is a not a scandal when a thief robs a bank, only when the president of the bank does, and I would surmise that more banks are robbed by ordinary thieves than by their own officers. Also, most of us have a low regard for those tabloids that treat scandal as their main attraction. Ignoring a scandal that may be titillating but insignificant or treating an otherwise scandalous incident with a degree of decorum helps to make certain media outlets "respectable." Although it has certainly been blurred, we still retain the distinction between "yellow" and "mainstream" journalism.
As the example from Plato shows, however, some of our greatest cultural achievements, like the Republic, have had to examine the phenomenon of scandal. Further, as Danner suggests, if today we are to "find a way to see beneath the surface," we need to have a clear understanding of what is fixating our view on the surface. To understand the centrality of scandal, as a social phenomenon and thus as a condition of our knowing, we need to look at language.
Reality becomes known and apprehended by humans only when it is named. Children clearly see things but still are driven to ask "What is this?" They do not seek an explanation but a name. Naming reveals the mystery of reality that manifests itself. I use the word "mystery" in the way we use it when we say that love is a mystery—not that it is unknown but that it is unfathomable, that with love there is always more to be known, grasped, and appreciated. Love, like reality and language, cannot be reduced to a formula. To name something is not to explain it away but to grant access to its mystery.
Normally we approach phenomena as something-to-be-explained. By "explained" we mean some sort of causal account. We list a series of space-time events to show how state A led to state B that then led to state C, the phenomenon we were seeking to grasp. This approach works well in most circumstances and is far preferable to seeking out occult answers or magical influences.
When this approach is applied to language, however, it is implicitly assumed that language is basically the same type of phenomenon as all other space-time events that we encounter. So we normally construe language to be made up of sounds that someone speaks and that bounce off the eardrums of the listener, stimulating nerves such that the same thought as was in the thinker's head is now in the listener's. But this is not language. Instead, it is communication, the kind that takes place among a large variety of animals.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses by Jeremiah L. Alberg Copyright © 2013 by Jeremiah L. Alberg. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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