Fish Story

On July 22, we saw the Gulf of Mexico oil spill reach its 3-month birthday.

Since its inception, we have had a live, twenty-four-hour, streaming, watch-it-as-it's-happening, judge-it-if-you-must, judge-it-again, denounce-and-drive-less, boycott-BP view of the oil spill (trans)action(s). We have also had twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week, malleable, variable, variously-incongruous streams of news, of misinformation, of new news to correct old news, of information to amend missed information, of it-must-be-someone-else's-fault-because-it-is-not-mine/ours/theirs/yours/his/hers blame-games, of someone-must-have-missed-this-story-so-it-must-be-real stories. Upside-inside-downside-out. What a world. What a world.

Can humor be the catch to a reality that is stubbornly and irreversibly a fish story?

Kurt Vonnegut, excerpt, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, applicable:

Penelope. I will not be scrogged. I remember one time I saw you wrench a hook from the throat of a fish with a pair of pliers, and you promised me that the fish couldn't feel.

Harold. It couldn't!

Penelope. I'd like to have the expert opinion of the fish--along with yours.

Harold. (Shaking his head) Fish can't feel.

Penelope. Well, I can. Some injuries, spiritual or physical, can be excruciating to me. I'm not a silly carhop any more. (An unexpected, minor insight.) Maybe you're wrong about fish. When I was a carhop, I didn't feel much more than a fish would. But I've been sensitized. I have ideas now--and solid information. I know a lot more now....

What do we know?

From BP?



From History?



From Vonnegut?

"...just as a fish flopping on a riverbank knows it belongs in the water."

From "America's Finest News Source"?

"Massive Flow of Bullshit Continues To Gush From BP Headquarters."

Photo Credits: Pat Bagley; Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Big Fish Eat Little Fish, 1556.

We Are All Witnesses

Had The Onion refrained from commenting on the recent spectacle of Lebron James, I probably would not have offered a sequel to my previous post. I probably would have let dead spectacles lie. But The Onion article reminded me that the spectacle does not die. And if it does, it is quickly resurrected.



Lebron's spectacle of excess, as I called it, certainly spawned a myriad of responses, though few failed to keep to themes of either commendation or contempt (despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the event produced unprecedented ratings). My initial surprise was in the fact that so many people were disturbed, not by Lebron's decision to choreograph a spectacle in his honor simply to make an announcement about a career move, but by his decision to leave Cleveland. Moreover, a great many accused him of abandoning the "metropolis of the Western reserve," especially considering that the Miami Heat were not even his highest bidders. Talk about a perversion of Bakhtin's notion of the spectacle of the marketplace....

Hence why The Onion article is so apposite, depicting a city unable to eradicate the specter of Lebron, and despite its best attempts, fated to wake daily and "find the iconic, 10-story-tall image of James--his arms fully extended after tossing his signature talcum powder into the air--completely intact, dominating the city's skyline as if it had never even been touched." After all, while the symbols of the commodity marketplace of late capitalism were once fleeting and variable, capitalism itself seemed permanent, intact. Today the distinctions between constituent elements and elemental system are not so clear. Especially in sports, human beings long been transformed into brands, rendering the body itself--as well as its image--in commodity form (for those interested in brand recognition and brand management, a historiography of athletes as brands would be an incredibly interesting study. Since Michael Jordan, for example, athletes have been "branded." What is more, though I cannot for the life of me recall where I heard/read this, it has been rumored that the "jumpman" logo was once more recognizable worldwide than the Christian cross. I am obviously more inclined to read this solely as a capitalist fable, but the allegory resonates).

So it is that today we have Lebron the icon, an idol of the commons, imploring that we worship no other while likewise spreading image after image, likeness after likeness of himself for the world to see. King James, defender of his own faith, authenticating the spectacular life, crumpling the now indecipherable words of The Society of the Spectacle and using the torn and withered pages as kindling for the hearth. Late capitalism alights his fireplace. The mass media sits warmly within the inglenook, proclaiming that getting on board is going overboard, is vindication for a "topsy-turvy world" in the spirit of Guy Debord. Truth is false. Or so it is when the crowned king is decrowned only to be crowned and crowned again ad infinitum.

Yet both Bakhtin and Debord (albeit in starkly distinct ways) remind us that with the solemnity of the icon must come the laugh of the iconoclast. For Bakhtin, the carnival. For Debord, a detournement--a deviation and adaptation of an image, an icon, in opposition of the original often in the form of satire or parody. How disappointing to find little in the way of detours on this one-way road. Chip Bok presents a step in a direction, but hardly downside up, outside in, wrong way up.



The carnival, the detournement--they are supposed to disrupt, to play at critical thought. They are supposed to enable the idolater to break the spell, to close his or her eyes to unquestioned belief, to break the idol, to chortle at the shards of broken images on the ground even if the object itself remains. Neither is irreligious; neither is ungoldy; both are devout to humanity; both might be unclean. Following Kenneth Burke, they are piously impious, redefining impiety as reorientation, as revision.

The spectacle of Lebron is like the ancient Roman circus, one of innumerable staged acts in a much larger cultural production, designed to distract by way of absorption, to deflect by way of appeal, to blend oppositions into a theater mask that conceals deeper socio-political issues. Stop the world: the King is set to speak.

The spectacle of anti-spectacles, the deliberative play of the carnival, of the detournement, of the impious is a triad of tactical rejoinders that all share in the distant spirit of Dionysia. Stop the world, but only to spin it counter-wise on its axis, to mock, jeer and transform awe into irreverence.

Bok begins to lay bare the implications of, how shall we say, bearing false witness. But he gives much too much credit to the supposed puppet masters. Are we witnesses to collusion? I am not so sure. Today's spectacles are far too overt, far too unapologetic, far too normalized to be collusive. What is more, I wonder if we are all not far too complicit to make such an accusation. At least for the moment. At least for the vast number of Lebron-esque types that are incessantly, if not obsessively, idolized.

Then again, one wonders if idolatrey's triumph will always succeed our mockery....

Photo Credits: The Onion; Chip Bok.

"King James" and the Spectacle of Excess

Mikhail Bakhtin once theorized that the author of a text--namely, a novel--maintains a unique, even privileged position outside the space of the text, whereby he or she "sees and knows more" than both the characters and the readers. Such is what Bakhtin dubbed an "excess" of seeing and knowing.

Today's "excesses" are a bit different, and surely extend far beyond the bookish confines of literature. For those not convinced, a brief discursion into the recent spectacle of Lebron James--already, in my book, relegated to infamy by way of its cheesy branding as "The Decision" (one need not even look for jokes about it, since the hour-long special is in itself a joke)--and, more particularly, into the peculiar realm of what is our modern culture of celebrity ought to do the trick.

I do not know who coined the phrase "culture of celebrity" (variously "celebrity culture"). Joseph Epstein is perhaps most often credited, though I know that Jill Neimark used the phrase some ten years prior. Anyways, we should not kid ourselves into thinking that any such culture is necessarily a new phenomenon. If anything, it is a perverse epiphenomenon whose originary source dates to ancient times. Indeed, we know that the Greeks lauded their athletes and their warriors, exalting them to demigod status and composing panegyrics in their praise (Pindar, for example). The Romans, too, would emblazon the mugs of their favorites on coinage. As Neimark rightly indicates, "Celebrity in America has always given us an outlet for our imagination, just as the gods and demigods of ancient Greece and Rome once did. Celebrities are our myth bearers; carriers of the divine forces of good, evil, lust, and redemption." Yet what was once esteem approaching divinity has devolved into acclaim approaching, if not already drowning in the waters of, excess.

Martin Fennelly contributed a recent post, entitled "Lebron takes self-importance to a new level," that humorously approaches such a sentiment. However, to think that Lebron is any "different' from, say, Tiger Woods, or David Beckham, or "Brangelina," or...is a trifle naive. Even today's peculiar mix of importance bestowed upon celebrities and the importance they bestow upon themselves is not novel (think of Achilles, though not through Brad Pitt's portrayal alone). The key difference seems to me to be the utter grandiloquence attached to the culture of celebrity, which literally permeates our everyday ways of seeing and knowing.

What makes Lebron's case a bit different is that his moniker, "King James," is self-ascribed, has been since his reign in Cleveland.



At least the veritable King James--the historical figure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most known for his Kingship of the Scots, his proclaimed Kingship of the English and Irish, his hints of severe superstition and subsequent witch hunts, his survival and unraveling of Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot, and his firm declaration of the divine right of Kings--earned his nickname as the "wisest fool in Christendom." This is not to say that Lebron does not have talent. The question is, at what cost and at whose expense?



Of course, a six-year, 110 million dollar contract (with an option to terminate after 4 years) might just make our contemporary King James the wisest fool in the NBA sitting atop the spoils of his throne.

To say that the case of Lebron is a tad perverse is an understatement. To follow Epstein into the squalor of celebrity culture as an epidemic institution and out again into the unavoidable spectacle (and, in Epstein's case, the odd denunciation of and desire for it) is, needless to say, unsatisfying. I am reminded of Roland Barthes' short treatise on the world of wrestling, which opens Mythologies. Here, Barthes elaborates on the "spectacle of excess," describing a public uninterested in the sheer frivolity and fallacious fanfare that guides an inordinate number into a wash of reckless abandon. Says Barthes: "[The public] abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees."

This certainly reframes Bakhtin's notion of an author's excess of seeing and knowing. We might ask, what it is that Lebron knows that we don't? Then again, is he the "true" author of his own story? Is he really the one exercising his kingly might, playing to the unknowing crowd of spectators, dictating the terms of his life and ours? Moreover, we might inquire into the transitory nature of the spectacle and the very culture of celebrity that drives it. To be sure, today's celebrity culture makes the question "fame" versus "celebrity" appear as mere quibbling, as itself an exercise in hype. Yet it is not altogether unsound to consider how instantaneously can our most heroic, most exalted personages fall from grace. And why? Because they are by in large brought to us as expendable. So, then, should we take account of our own investments.

I think it therefore apt to consider an excerpt from George Wither's satire, which he wrote to King James (the original).

Did I not know a great man's power and might
In spite of innocence can smother right,
Colour his villainies to get esteem,
And make the honest man the villain seem?

King James, after all, will never lose his title as the "wisest fool...," "The King" will ever be remembered as much for the cadence of his voice (let alone his pelvis) as for his consociation with codeine pills, "The King of Pop" will never be rid of either his iconic or his self-adulterated status, and then, too, there is Tiger Woods (and so, so many others). Yet we are wrong, I think, to place too much blame on any one individual (indeed, even Wither acknowledged his "country prejudice" and "thee"). A spectacle, after all, is in need of the spectacular as much as the spectator. Then again, it is in need of what Bakhtin calls "carnival uncrownings," whereby a "king's attributes are turned upside down in the clown" and the king becomes "king of a world 'turned inside out'." It remains to be seen, the fate of our present day King James, let alone who will be the clown to disrupt the very culture of his seeming sovereignty. Whether it is up to us or to him is....

Photo Credits: New York Daily News; Pier Nicola D'Amico (SLAM Magazine); biblemuseum.net