Rumors

Mladen Dolar
Polity: Theory Redux, pp. 155

Rumor-mongers get a bad rap in the Bible. In Romans, Paul describes how people who’ve turned against God are “full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity”. Some of them are even “whisperers”. For Christians, gossip is wrong because it is often false and almost always socially divisive: the tongue is just as capable of great damage as it is of kindness. Much of today’s social, political, and media life, as Mladen Dolar notes in this lively and brilliant little book, is nevertheless given over to tittle-tattle, reputational damage, and false, exaggerated, and damaging claims that seem to come from nowhere, spread rapidly, and poison the atmosphere. Group chats sharing salacious knowledge (“I heard that…”) spill over into the public domain, where outlandish claims about figures – famous and private alike – go viral and become part of humanity’s permanent electronic record. Dolar proposes to describe this dynamic but unstable situation as “the general rumorization of society”.

If you’re not yet familiar with his work, Mladen Dolar is one of the leading psychoanalytic philosophers of our age. Along with Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and others, Dolar is part of the Slovene School, based in Ljubljana. Their often-dazzling texts and lectures take in popular phenomena alongside great scholars, deepening our understanding of culture and philosophical ideas alike.

In Rumors, Dolar proposes to treat his topic “as an ontological entity”, which teaches us something about social bonds, language itself, the nature of knowledge, and our current predicament. On the one hand, we enter a kind of “Enlightenment utopia” in which everyone can potentially be in contact, and all the world’s knowledge is immediate and accessible. On the other, social ties seem to have frayed to the point of collapse. The internet appears as everything from lapidary truths to a toilet wall, complete with obscene expressions of desire, maliciously doled out information, and hostile mutterings of all kinds.

Despite their seemingly ineradicable character, rumors are low meat: we feel dirty for dealing in them. As Dolar puts it: “What could be further away from the high mission and dignity of philosophy than paying attention to rumors, gossip, hearsay, tittle-tattle, slander, calumny, prattle, denigration?” And yet, over a hundred or so pages, Dolar, with the help of Virgil, Socrates, Kierkegaard, Hamlet, The Barber of Seville, Rousseau, Kafka (“someone must have been spreading rumors about Josef K.”), Gogol, Hesiod, Heidegger, Balzac, and a curious story by Cervantes in which a pair of dogs discuss language (which a young Freud and friend used to practice their Spanish), unpicks the separation of high and low in a most entertaining and convincing way.

But what, after all, is a rumor? How do we differentiate rumors from opinions, knowledge, and conspiracy? First of all, Dolar argues, unlike opinions, “nobody quite subscribes to them”. They circulate anonymously, impersonally: “they go around like a breeze of air” but the breeze “easily turns into a tempest, a whirlwind, an indomitable force”. The Romans noticed this in their proverb, Fama cresct eundo – rumor grows as it goes. And yet for all their murky origins, rumors nevertheless carry “am unfathomable, inscrutable, intractable authority”. Their audience wish rumors to possess a certain truthiness, if only for a brief, naughty second.

To explain, Dolar draws on the concept of the “big Other”, vital for understanding psychoanalysis. Western philosophy begins with the separation between doxa (opinion) and epistēmē (knowledge). Socrates – ultimately undone by rumors, as Dolar notes – is endlessly seeking to dismantle his interlocutors’ opinions and set thinking instead on the correct path of truth and knowledge. This grounding of truth in logos – what is universally valid and binding – lends certain claims authority.

More prosaically, we invoke the big Other whenever we wish our claims to have coherence, reality, and a certain strength. Rumors – who depend precisely on no one for their authority – are the dark underbelly of proper knowledge: they “stick”, even when disproved. Dolar cites another Roman proverb to this end: Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret – Slander boldly, something always sticks. As every denouncer somehow hopes: “once one is framed by rumors, one is always in a hopelessly defensive position, that is, quasi-doomed to defend oneself in vain.” Gossip and rumor thus form the evil twin of rational, Enlightenment truths, rather than their opposite: a point beautifully made in Dolar’s analysis of calumny in Rossini’s opera and in the paranoia of Rousseau, who wrote confessional text after confessional text, seeking to defend himself, unsuccessfully, from public humiliation, eventually attempting to leave a plea in Notre Dame Cathedral. Finding the altar blocked, Rousseau imagined that even God was in on the conspiracy against him – the truth was, he really was persecuted by other great Enlightenment thinkers, including Diderot and Voltaire: yet his reaction was still excessive insofar as he imagined an all-pervasive hidden, cosmic plot. In attempting to fill in all the gaps in knowledge, reason itself can easily tip over into paranoia.

The language of “rabbit holes”, “echo chambers”, and “fake news” is by now familiar. Who gets to decide what counts as information becomes much more transparently a matter of power, as trust in mainstream media has completely collapsed. As Elon Musk posted in February this year: “What’s the difference between a conspiracy and the truth? About 6 months.” At the same time, at the moral level., in the absence of a culture of atonement and forgiveness, we have now what amounts to a permanent and vengeful memory-machine, where every last claim, regardless of veracity, can be dredged up again and again, without mercy, against anyone who speaks, particularly when their views are otherwise unpopular. MeToo, in particular, demonstrated the power and devastation of extra-legal rumor at scale.

While Dolar deliberately offers no particular solution to all this – for there is none – the reader is perversely comforted by the deeper understanding that Dolar provides: we are called to reflect on our own participation in rumor-mills, and to understand that we have, as ever, a choice. We may do well to take up Kierkegaard’s amusing proposal, cited here, for a law that would order that everything spoken about should be treated as if it had happened fifty years ago – this, he says, would reduce the gossips to despair, but permit serious discussion among those who could “really talk”. Let us not lose our ability to differentiate high from low, while remaining all-too-aware of the hidden reverse at the heart of speech itself.