The Yankee Fan with the Golden Gun

@stevenpoole asked a really good question:

What exactly is the "news value" of a picture of a dead body that is not already contained in the information that said person is dead?

Do such images add "news value" to descriptions like:

In a cellphone video that went viral on the Internet, the deposed Libyan leader is seen splayed on the hood of a truck and then stumbling amid a frenzied crowd, seemingly begging for mercy. He is next seen on the ground, with fighters grabbing his hair. Blood pours down his head, drenching his golden brown khakis, as the crowd shouts, “God is great!”

When the news first came out about Gaddafi's execution, the photographs and video images did - not despite, but as evidence for, the analyses of Barthes and Sontag - provide a sense of confirmation, but this sense of confirmation may be adding something other than what I would understand by "news value"; its value lies elsewhere.

Pity the Fool

France is undoubtedly a great nation, although we all know it peaked as a place, as a concept, as une histoire almost two thousand years ago, when a small band of indomitable Gauls held off the Roman Empire. Since then, there have been highs (Diderot, Serge Gainsbourg, Zidane) and lows (Vichy France, the sacking of Africa, Henry); the recent arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the extension of his New York visit at Riker's Island is unlikely to be recorded as one of the high points in French history.

This blog is not devoted to z-list celebrities, much less to the Nixonian gnome, Ben Stein, but we did recently dwell upon the question of his comedy and sexism, Parte Une and Parte Deux; although I thought I firmly closed the door on him, he's slipped back into our consciousness by writing a wretched little piece for The American Spectator in which he rushes to defend the honour and reputation and presumed innocence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn by slandering hotel maids, crying class warfare while evoking the image of the guillotine, and saying that, Come on, a short fat guy can't sexually assault a woman.

Much more interesting is the case made by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, like me, is a philosopher, and, also like me, tends to go by his initials: BHL. In fact, BHL and I are like two peas in a pod, and might even be mistaken for twins were it not for his far better hair and his inimitable capacity to arch a single eyebrow.

In The Daily Beast, his piece is prefaced by a little blurb:

No one knows if the IMF director is guilty of sexual assault—and by dragging him through the mud, politicians and the press are committing gross acts of injustice, says French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Yes, no one knows what really happened, except, of course, for the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and a widowed refugee mother. But other than them, nobody knows. I would encourage readers to find BHL's piece to dwell on his epistemological scrutiny of what it is we know. And do not know.

If readers do not wish to dwell, I will start the dwelling off for them.

BHL's piece begins with a fact, an irrefutable fact.

"Monday morning."

Yes. Monday morning. Not Tuesday, not Wednesday, definitely not Thursday. I laugh at the thought it might be Friday or Saturday, and cast a melancholic glance at those who think it might be Sunday. And nor is noon, much less afternoon; do not deceive yourselves: it is not evening or night. "Monday morning."

That established, he goes on: "I do not know--no one knows, because there have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question--if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there. . ." We have come to our first epistemological insight from the philosopher. In the world before, the world that precedes ours, in the past, we might have asked whether it is possible that the alleged perpetrator or the alleged victim knows, but this is the world of Julian Assange, and all we can know must come through leaks. A foolish reader of BHL, a real idiot, might say that the implication is that there is "no one" and there is Strauss-Kahn, there is the "no one" who knows, and there is Strauss-Kahn who knows, and that this formulation submerges the alleged victim into "no one." But such a statement would betray a real lack of philosophical insight.

Those who are not philosophers should stop reading now, because it's about to get complicated. Having established not only the epistemological limits of who can know, but also the rhetorical patter of the epistemological question itself, he goes on: "I do not know--but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay--how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York's grand hotels of sending a "cleaning brigade" of two people, in the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet." The opening of this sentence could have come straight out of Derrida: the sly introduction of "on the other hand" without presenting the first hand, the double-barrelling of the question with both epistemological and ontological urgency, all couched in a homely but spry spirit of inquiry from a position of ignorance. The next part of the sentence could also have come straight out of Derrida, or Foucault, or Deleuze and Guattari, or anybody else who has ever spent a night in a New York hotel, especially a grand one: it is simply a fact that chambermaids never walk alone into rooms. To doubt this is something that even Descartes would have considered outre. Chambermaids, like presence and absence or power and truth or being and time, are never without their double.

Having demonstrated that nobody can know what happened, except that nobody can explain the sheer impossibility of a single chambermaid entering a hotel room, we are invited to share what BHL does know: that dime-store psychology is not helpful, that "nothing in the world can justify a man being thrown thus to the dogs", that no suspicion should allow the entire world to revel in this man's disgrace, that no earthly law should allow another woman to be exposed to this slime. Passing through the unknowable into the known, BHL drives towards one truth that stands above all others, an insight that justifies the hyperbole, the aroused rhetoric, his impassioned and devastating study of the inflamed epistemologies of the contemporary soul: the New York tabloid press is a disgrace to the profession.

Oh he is so right! They so are.

BHL goes on to talk about other things he knows about the exploitation of this scandal and the politicking, with a sensuously righteous sneer at those who righteously sneer. What we see in Ben Stein's hack-handed attempt to weasel his way back into the limelight and BHL's priapic defence of his friend is the failure of boorish politics and quasi-philosophical musings to address the sheer nastiness of this situation, however close they stumble to real, fundamental problems about publicity, presumptions of guilt and innocence, to questions of class, race, friendship, politics, and legal process that affect how and what we know; why this nastiness is exploited and enjoyed is a question both men veer away from investigating and answering seriously.

This, on the other hand, begins to say some interesting things:

IMF Chief tried to fuck New York chambermaid after mistaking her for a small financially crippled country.

It's crude, perhaps Onion-quality? But it's infinitely more damning than either Stein's or BHL's analyses as a reflection of those real, fundamental problems about publicity, presumptions of guilt and innocence, those questions of class, race, friendship, politics, and legal process that affect how and what we know, and how nasty this publicity, these presumptions, and these questions are.

Foul is Fair

To see somebody writhing about in agony and to enjoy it, that is one of the heftiest cornerstones in the Escher-planned, Gaudi-designed, jerry-rigged, ghost-inhabited house of comedy. Many an observer of human nature, many a commentator on the spirit of man and woman and child, many a languid gossip about life, has crafted an aphorism about pleasures to be had in the suffering of others. Indeed, why not offer it up as a definition of the human? "To be human is to take pleasure in the suffering of another." Other animals may play in a mode of what looks like thrilling malevolence, as when a bristle-pawed cat flips and pats and tosses a mouse into the air before delivering the death blow, but is that thrilling malevolent play the same thing as taking pleasure in watching the suffering of another? Maybe? Well, regardless, I won't insist that this definition necessarily and wholly excludes the animal Other, anymore than I'll insist it's a proper definition of the human.

The cultures of morality and religion have never managed to denounce or tamp out the pleasure humans take in the suffering of others, and not infrequently appropriates this pleasure and this suffering, quite possibly because without pleasure in suffering, they would be redundant? But for now, the ways in which enjoyment of the suffering of others is specifically comic merits some thought. We could easily become perturbed by definitions and nuances and questions about where comedy's boundary is smudged. Victories, for example, are often accompanied by jubilant laughter. Is this laughter the same thing as laughter at comedy? Both involve a sense of superiority and emotional relief; the False Alarm theory of comedy, which we'll return to some other day, is a fairly weak one (though it is not typically portrayed as weak), but it postulates that laughter evolved as a sort of caveman hoot to indicate that - in the example always given - what they thought was a sabre-toothed tiger was actually just a play of shadows, or, in the example I give, what they thought was a sabre-toothed tiger was actually just Thog coming out of the underbrush, still wiping himself. The laughter of victory is a way indicating that the threat of the vanquished foes was a false alarm: they are now humiliated; they were, basically, just a false alarm. And then there is the laughter of joy, the laughter of delight and happiness in the world, which is also always somewhat comic, because joy and delight and happiness are necessarily incongruous with the miserable lot of life, and so to immerse oneself in them always involves some degree of forgetting the suffering of others. Is there something of a blindness towards the suffering of others intimated in every laugh, whether it is the insistent refusal to see the suffering of Others or a forgetting of that suffering?

As I write this, laughter is in the air.

Late last night at work in a secluded office, I opened up The Huffington Post, a site I generally loathe but nevertheless check, and saw a massive headline blaring in inch-high letters: "DEAD". Before I scrolled down to see the picture, I was shaken: "Oh no, it's finally happened! Morrissey's gone!"

But it turned out to be Osama Bin Laden! Dead!

Celebrating a death without mourning it is a strange pleasure, one I would not quickly disavow. As Mark Twain said, "I've never wished anyone dead, but I have read some obituaries with pleasure." Well, he's a better man than I. Having passed the site of the World Trade Center many times over the past decade, I can attest to the fact that the gaping, half-constructed sepulchre was also a constant reminder that the master-perpetrator of the act had eluded justice. That his body was treated "in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition" is all well and good, although I understand they were following the practice and tradition of one of the smaller Islamic sects by sodomising the corpse with a goat trained specifically for that purpose.

For some reason, I took a roll through the manure to see what Sarah Palin and the people/groups she is following on twitter were saying as the news started to come out. I only found two comments amusing, both by Ann Coulter - although Coulter's jibe about waiting for the death certificate was probably not, as I first took it to be, an amused reflection on the pedantry of the birthers and more likely was another conflation of Obama with the Other. The rest of the tweets, perhaps unsurprisingly, were marked by the stuttering sound of pellets of boilerplate patriotism being cranked out, and the sour-breathed cringes of twitter-asides, some of gratitude to GWB, but mostly snide ones about BO.

Killing Osama without, presumably, recording the attack on film, and then plopping his remains into the sea has two unfortunate consequences: one, doubting Thomases will find this highly suspicious and will give the manure-grubbers of the right something to feed upon; two, we didn't get to watch him suffer. If justice is a form of retribution, a carefully stage-managed return to the scene of the crime as a ritualised re-enactment, a response to a violence committed against society - and it is all of these things - then the most-televised mass murder of all time has been answered with what amounts to a private killing. But that is one of the points of justice; justice is also a rejection of blood lust, it is infiltrated with cautions, with checks against vitriolic savagery. Justice must not be guided by our own suffering, it must be blinded to the wild biases and cognitive shattering that comes from being attacked; it must temper our desire to turn our own suffering into a cataclysm of another's suffering. Somewhere, maybe in lots of places, Derrida talks of justice only as the justice-to-come. Justice always suffers its own imperfections, it is not blind, only blindfolded. But the comments about the treatment of Osama's body and the avoidance of hurting others (presumably people holing up in the compound with him?) in the attack, the use of the language of policing (putting Osama's body into "custody", a fascinating concept that insists upon the protection of that which has long been subject to desecration, usually by goats trained specifically for that purpose: the body of the enemy; it may also be a perverse echo of habeas corpus, and a de-souled, de-spiritualised, de-personalised view of the enemy that would make his corpse subject to martial law because his body with or without a living subjectivity is the same thing - although I will leave this line of reasoning to Agamben) is the language of justice. It will never be satisfying. The body is gone, Osama cannot suffer on earth anymore, or repay what he has done; there is no compensation; the execution of justice is its own acquiescence to crime.

Fortunately, comedy lacks the checks and restraints and proprieties of formal justice, allowing us to linger at a place this formal justice has insisted we now leave with its rigid sense of "closure". I look forward to the alternative obituary, the one written into jokes and cartoons, where a different form of blindness to suffering can be indulged, where justice is freed from everything that would protect us from the pleasures of another's suffering.

As Steve Martin tweeted: Slow News Day.