Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere

4. Scandalous Reading

 Chapter Four Scandalous Reading The Intrigues of the New Public Sensorium The Public Sphere Gone Bad The long history of the scandal press—from the Renaissance “intrigue” to the chronique scandaleuse and bruit public of eighteenth-century France, the Literaturbriefe of eighteenth-century Germany, the sporting press and spy papers of nineteenth-century America, and finally, to the twentieth century’s yellow journalism, Hollywood tabloids, and their televisual equivalents—often looks like the Habermasian public sphere gone bad. In theory that public sphere practices a rational-critical discourse, produces intersubjectively formulated truths, and ultimately enables an agency in the form of supervision of institutions of power. Instead of truth and agency, the scandal sphere seems to offer little more than highly manipulated spectacle meant for easy consumption; it is often perceived as a product of the culture industry masquerading as news and information. One of the most frustrating aspects of scandal is that it perverts the theoretical goal—the utopian wish—for truth and agency at the heart of the public-sphere concept. Indeed, media-reported scandals seem to wickedly and willfully play off that wish—the public sphere will disclose the truth (the real person behind the politician’s mask, the people actually running the system, the pathways of the money, the president ’s penis), and truth leads to agency. This wish is a central part of the pleasure of scandal, but that pleasure frequently turns melancholic: the knowledge that scandal brings is seldom accompanied by the wishedfor agency. Instead, scandal consumption is often attended by the sense { 95 96 } f e v e r r e a d i n g of finding oneself in an ever more complex system where the object of desire—effective knowledge—remains seemingly just out of reach. The structures of scandals are compulsively repeated, but little changes. We all know, but knowing changes nothing; knowledge leads nowhere. In addition to being about the outré details of the rich and famous, and beyond being about the secrets of obscure and complex institutions, scandal is about dilemmas faced by all who live in the modern public sphere—problems of knowing, problems of acting on knowledge, problems of drawing a line of causation between knowledge and action. One of the central arguments made in this chapter is that representations of scandal often represent precisely these problems. But at its boldest the argument is something more: that the consumption of scandal is a way of navigating through these problems. In light of both the modern ubiquity of scandal and its entanglement in these issues of the public sphere and agency, “[w]hat’s odd,” as Laura Kipnis notes in an overview of recent scholarship on scandal, “is how little inquisitiveness there’s been about the social dynamics involved” (“School” 73).¹ What remains particularly under-investigated is the consumption of scandal. This chapter is in large part about that consumption —in the form of reading scandal—in the early and mid-nineteenth century. If the previous chapter focused on the ways people read about sex rather than on the representation of sex or the social construction of sex, this chapter focuses on the way people read about scandal. This emphasis on reading scandal and its effects is no easy matter, because the experience of scandal reading is so conflicted and complex. Scandal reading is only partially an experience that can be understood as what might be called rational; instead, its consumption is in large part emotional, and those emotions are complicated. We habitually devour scandal stories, but self-loathingly. They are exciting, yet cloying. They produce a schadenfreude that quickly feels shameful. Scandals shock, but they also enervate; they bemuse even as they outrage. Kipnis has suggested understanding the emotional double movement of scandal in psychoanalytic terms: scandal allows both the individual and society at large to simultaneously desire and disavow certain wants and needs. In this sense, scandal is a “social purification ritual” where “the socially non-compliant [are] branded and expelled, allowing the system to assert itself and make its muscle” even as individuals get their enjoyments (How to Become 14). As consumers of scandal, we all participate in this notunpleasant ritual of social management, regulation, and interpellation. scandalous reading { 97 Kipnis’s psychodynamic, subversion-containment model of consumption is compelling, but here I do want to investigate another dimension of scandal consumption in hopes of developing, in a somewhat different...