"By the way, what is a man?
Please don't ask me what a man is.
All I have learned is his price." - Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill
I did not want to speak about the current rage, recent fave, latest craze of contemplating phalluses and the phallocentrism of the minds that value them and send them out to do their slaves' bidding. I won't, in fact, discuss it here. Instead, I read a very fine diary today from a Kossack entitled "I was 'Weinered,'" and it got me thinking about old thoughts I had once had about what was going on with this photospastic generation (which includes us old folks, by the way).
My thoughts may be a bit abstract. I've said before that Abstraction is my muse. (She's invisible. In the portraits, she's more implied than visible.) Since I've been confusing in the past, I've decided to lay out my case in miniature before the bump and then establish it after.
1. Revolutions are never known when they occur. No one ever has a name for a revolutionary thing or moment.
2. Changes in society are almost always accidental.
3. Technology only allows what would otherwise be implicit to be extensive.
4. The clash of resistant social codes and emergent social codes will be visible in discomfort.
5. The material basis of U.S. society, at least, has confronted a recalcitrant social structure to create a grave unintended consequence of commodification of the flesh and prostitution of the unwilling and unwitting.
That may sound
too abstract. Let me take my grounding pills and see if I can say it more clearly.
In other words, there is a persistent social code that sets up a value on innocence and privacy. This is now in extreme conflict with the other antique code, which is "finders keepers" and "everything's worth what a buyer will pay" and "liberty." Technology has accelerated this conflict, which was already present, and created a revolution where, because the crisis has not been addressed, the problems are worsening, and we are creating, literally, a prostitution of the by-stander.
If that's intriguing at all, please follow along. I know that it's dense. I'm sorry for that. I promise to be as clear as the mud and my native wit allow me to be.
Let's start with the obvious preconditions that we should all acknowledge, ok?
1. The moral precondition:
From the early 19th century (see Bill Bryson's At Home for the most pleasant introduction to the history of the subject, Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage for a deeper and more detailed one), we have had the concept not only of the atomic individual, but of privacy. "Atomic" individuals are individuals who are the smallest unit, atoms. They are also autonomous. (This goes to Hobbes, and the invention of the sovereign individual politically predates privacy.) This is when we have individual bedrooms and the child and adult separate even among the middle classes. We Americans had privacy in a way Europeans didn't, because we had room. We built very large houses, and we had the frontier, and so being alone and being secret (which is not being private) were open to us.
Privacy is a social compact to hold to an invisible border around information and space relating to an individual. No law impels it. Your parent can walk in, but she or he "respects" "your" privacy.
The child is special, innocent, and precious
Unrelated to privacy, we have a moral value across our political landscape (enforced by law civil and criminal) that the child is reserved. Childhood is defined by age of consent, by age of majority, by franchise, and by selective service. It is also defined commercially by credit and banking. During the state of childhood, a human is held outside of the normal exchange -- no voting, drinking, sex, etc. However, there is implied or stated the idea that the child cannot participate because not a full member of society as well as because in a state of innocence.
2. The existing material code.
Before -- long before -- the explosion of "reality television," the U.S. had put material exchange on fame. Andy Warhol's infamously misquoted line that in the 1970's everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes was a social comment rather than satire. Warhol enjoyed this element of culture, apparently, and saw it accelerating.
It was not many years ago that The National Enquirer was vile and unread as representing the worst of us. People Magazine had to be invented. However, both now are en vogue and have endless reflections. The world wide web's earliest days did nothing but amplify the existing trend of self-promotion, and self congratulation on the self-promotion.
Theoretically, there was a day when newspapers would never use a found photo of a politician in disgrace. According to legend, newspapers would shun scandals that were not relevant. However, beforeGary Hart, such glory days had fled the earth. Fuzzy photos from telephoto lenses, a la the longstanding practice of the U.K., were commonplace.
After "reality television" replaced all other forms of television, the jig was up entirely. Paris Hilton's fame came from her whoopsie, after all. The same was true of several criminals and wealthy children.
3. What we don't call it.
We talk about tabloids, sexting, reality television, boys out of control, junk shots, Weinergate, Foleygate, and all sorts of other things, but these names are all badges and stickers applied to manifestations. Each one of these names is a noun hurled at a verb, a verb that is active. Marx said that the moment you have a name for a thing, the thing has lost its ideological value. It's "safe" when you can give it a name.
The women and men of the enlightenment did not sit around saying, "You know, I want to start rationalism." They were horked off by prior thought and were reacting. The early novelists didn't call them novels and didn't know that that's what they were. They were fighting against other novelists or trying to make money when the theaters were closed.
Something is happening. I do not have a name for it, and I cannot show its contours. We will have both later, when it's too late. However, I can tell people to look below the individual acts.
4. YOU ARE A CRIME!
I feel confident that you have been without clothing. You may have even seen yourself that way. (In my case, it's a pure accident. I don't like mirrors.)
Your body is private. However, it is only legal if it remains that way. All bodies belonging to persons below the age of, let's say 18, are crimes. They are quite literally criminal offenses to see. The flesh of an adult is a crime to display, but not to view. So long as the code of privacy and the legal code of childhood remain intact, our lives work well, but if either is disturbed, we end up with a conflict.
The material code, which emphasizes money from fame, and fame from, above all else, being looked at, being watched, is in deep conflict with the moral code. Remember: your body, and a child's body, are both crimes.
5. Gasoline on the fire.
At the same time that this existing material code ("Get famous means get rich"; "Get stared at means get famous") was always in conflict with privacy and childhood, technology accelerated the intrusion into the borders of privacy and the betrayal of the rules against the body.
The cell phone camera, the web camera, the video itself, are all meaning that photographs of flesh are in existence. These depictions are objects that can be exchanged and traded. Joe Francis makes greasy dollars off of "Girls Gone Wild." James O'Keefe makes mucosa dollars off of hidden cameras. In either case, what happens is that the image is traded and the person's body becomes an unwitting by-product, unwilling raw material for this industry.
Young girls are feeling the thrill of newly arrived sexual power or perhaps giving in to repeated requests, but they may take a snap and send it off to a boyfriend. That is now a unit of exchange for him. A boy or man has his photograph of his chest, let's say, and he should keep it to himself or those who ask for it, but he abridges the circle because it's easy to do.
So...
It seems to me, at long last, we can't blame the technology for accelerating what was already existing. We can choose, though, whether we want to keep childhood and privacy or keep the freakshow, circus geek, pornographer mart of visual exchange. If we want the latter, we need to do more than just go after "sexting." We'll have to go after the practice, the habit, of rewarding the spectacle fame as well.