Under Suspicion

A Phenomenology of Media

Boris Groys, Carsten Strathausen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231518499
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phénoménologie en philosophie

The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics.

Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity—a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview.

II The Economy of Suspicion

8	Marcel Mauss: Symbolic Exchange; or, Civilization Under Water

THE AURA OF MEDIAL SINCERITY AND DURABILity—the aura of exception—is continuously transferred from one sign to another according to the economy of media-ontological suspicion. In order to understand the rules of this economy, one should remember some of the older theoretical projects that try to describe an economy beyond the market. At issue in particular is an economy of the sacred, which is similar to the medial economy insofar as the power of the sacred is likewise presumed to reside “inside” things rather than manifesting itself directly on their outside. Understood as such a hidden, interior power, the sacred follows the rules of a particular economy as it moves from one thing to the next. In his famous essay The Gift (1923/24), Marcel Mauss was the first to try to describe such an economy systematically as an economy that includes the interior of things and thus transcends the ordinary market economy.¹

Mauss begins his essay with the observation that among all peoples at all times, the gift displays a paradoxical nature. Although gifts are, by definition, voluntary, humans nonetheless are subject to a social obligation to give, accept, and reciprocate gifts. Firm rules govern the exchange of gifts, rules that are equally familiar to all gift givers and receivers, even though those rules are neither explicitly formulated nor expressible as such. A gift is commonly considered an expression of free will, of individual generosity, of a highly personal dedication, and particularly of a general preparedness for renunciation beyond the usual economic calculation. In this sense, the motif for an individual’s decision to give gifts to others is believed to lie exclusively in the inner nature and character of this individual, which reveals itself as either generous or stingy.

On the other hand, however, society shuns and penalizes a person who does not offer gifts. The individual is forced to give gifts in order to be socially accepted and to benefit from this acceptance while avoiding harm. Both benefit and harm can certainly be described in economic terms. Behind the illusion of free will, the exchange of gifts hides a coercion that emerges from an economy no less regulated by strict rules than the economy of money or the market. Mauss called this different economy the symbolic economy. The symbolic economy enforces not only the giving of gifts but also the acceptance of gifts and the offering of countergifts. Whoever does not accept the gift offends the gift giver. And whoever does not reciprocate the gift ends up in a socially unfavorable position. The gift, which is supposed to reveal the inner nature of human beings—that is, their ability or inability to be generous—thus emerges as a factor in a symbolic economy that ascribes certain “inner values” to its participants.

To be sure, Mauss considers symbolic exchange an archaic form of economy that predates the modern money economy. At the same time, however, he assumes that by no means did the symbolic economy lose its power with the arrival of money and the commodity market, because the symbolic economy is much more comprehensive than the market. In this sense, Mauss ultimately sees no difference relevant to his theory between so-called archaic and modern cultures. Even in the culture of European modernity, the market can claim only partial validity because it does not involve “inner values.” The symbolic exchange of gifts, by contrast, is total and comprehensive. It is a “system of total prestations” because it exchanges not only commodities such as those in a normal money economy, but also “courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contract.”²

When a person presents a voluntary gift to another person without demanding or receiving an equivalent monetary “compensation,” the gift recipient feels internally obligated to the gift giver. He owes the giver “inner,” symbolic values such as respect, thankfulness, and a feeling of solidarity, all of which are certainly important social goods that improve and solidify the position of the gift giver in society. What is more, the gift recipient is obligated to offer a countergift. He must “retaliate” for the gift so as not to be despised by others or despise himself. Thus, the solidarity created by the gift may even be more effective, economically speaking, than a purely financial obligation. “Inner” values such as friendship, love, and honor are exchanged within the context of the symbolic economy, too. According to Mauss, no selfless, heroic deed, no sacrifice, no squandering in ecstasy, and no generous donation could fall outside the symbolic economy of the gift, because all of them force society to offer symbolic services in return while bestowing glory, prestige, admiration, and thus also a better social position and power onto the human subject of these selfless deeds. Such deeds, to be sure, are no less selfless and generous because of this reciprocation. Quite the contrary: it is only within the economy of symbolic exchange that these symbolic gestures are considered generous deeds worthy of admiration.

The economization of the selfless, the generous, the self-sacrificing, and even the self-destructive—in short, of the romantic—is certainly the most fascinating aspect of Mauss’s model of symbolic exchange. The modern teachings about the market and market behavior that have circulated at least since Adam Smith suggest a highly specific model of the human being that supposedly defines the “interiority” of the individual agent of this market. According to this model, the protagonist of the market is a self-serving, calculating, ruthless individual whose behavior is determined exclusively by a cost-benefit analysis. Because such a “typical,” bourgeois individual allegedly lacks a sense of what is noble and selfless, he was and remains the permanent target of romantically inspired critique and irony on the one hand and social mockery on the other. This is why romanticism—including political romanticism—looks for an antibourgeois alternative in art, in religion, and also in the military—actually primarily in the military, because the military most radically demands selfless sacrifice, loyalty until death, and the predominance of honor from every individual. These alternatives give everyone a chance to act in accordance with his inner and thus higher principles and impulses, which no longer can be reduced to an external, economic, base calculation.

Yet Mauss engages in an elegant attempt to describe precisely this “inner and higher” romantic ideal of selflessness and “true greatness” as partaking of and governed by the extended economy, understood as the strictly regulated mutual exchange of gift and countergift. On the one hand, these gestures of selfless generosity thus gain legitimacy precisely in terms of economic expediency. Now, even an ardent advocate of capitalist markets can no longer claim that all of this is just a romantic fantasy. On the other hand, however, Mauss also radically de-romanticizes the romantic and subordinates it to the reign of the economic. This is why people have always had a hard time with Mauss’s theory. Reading Mauss, we are constantly confronted with an irony that is by no means only literary but emerges from the subject matter itself. Every theoretical explanation is both justification and degradation: it insults what it explains. By the way, a theory that seeks to explain something is always already a selfless gift to the object of explanation. By means of the explanation, this object is understood and its social existence legitimated. However, the object of theory cannot—or can only rarely—reciprocate the gift of explanation adequately. And this offends it internally. For example, we know all too well that artists and writers feel offended and misunderstood precisely by those critics or theoreticians whose gift of interpretation was instrumental in helping them achieve respect and glory.

Mauss constantly thematizes this, in his words, agonistic character of the gift. Every gift is simultaneously a challenge and an assault on the dignity of the recipient—an assault that must be repelled by a countergift. In many passages of his book, Mauss demonstrates the structural similarity between gift giving and warlike action. In some cultures, for example, it is customary to throw the gift into the dirt right at the recipient’s feet, much as one throws down a gauntlet to declare war on another—yet this custom nonetheless remains a celebration of gift giving. Mauss also quotes the well-known German expression “to retaliate for the gift” [sich für das Geschenk revanchieren] in order to emphasize this warlike component. By means of the gift, the gift giver gains symbolic control over the recipient, who feels obligated to the giver and relegated to a lower social rank than he.

Under certain circumstances, a whole society can feel obligated to a single person because of his selfless sacrifice, in which case the person gains significant symbolic power over that society. The first gift exchange, according to Mauss, was a gift exchange with gods, spirits, and the dead. When I offer a sacrifice to the gods, this sacrifice may appear to be a pure destruction of goods, when, in fact, the gods are supposed to feel compelled to offer a countergift. If I repeatedly offer sacrifices to my god, then I expect him to help me in a later, difficult situation that I might not foresee at the time I make the sacrifice. The symbolic economy is thus by no means limited to human beings. Rather, this economy is totalizing in the sense of including gods, spirits, dead ancestors, and unborn people within its gift exchange. It may well be the most important dimension of this economy that, contrary to the market economy, it is not structured anthropologically and includes not only everybody who is alive but also all spirits of all times as well.

According to Mauss, only within the context of the symbolic economy can something like a “living personality” or “individuality” emerge and a person attain a “face” that expresses his “interior.”³ The inner character of a person is not biologically endowed but produced as the effect of this person’s symbolic actions. If the recipient does not reciprocate the gift, then he loses face. But why can one lose face by failing to offer a countergift? Evidently, one attains one’s face only as a gift giver. The word personality is derived from the Latin persona. A persona is a mask, a word that originally meant the same as “face.” To have a face, a persona, was thus originally an honor, a privilege. In earlier times, not everybody had a face, not everybody had a persona; officers or priests, for example, were clearly privileged in this regard.⁴ And by no means did an officer have his own face; he had an officer’s face—the mask of honor. The face was thus part of the uniform. When an officer did something that violated military honor, he lost his face and sullied his uniform. Personality, face, and individuality are thus being exchanged like all other signs within the symbolic economy, which is why it would be meaningless to try to identify the subject of this economy. Each protagonist of the symbolic economy can attain his own personality only by taking over a sign that has a long history—a face that others have already worn for a long time. Similarly, to possess an unrepeatable, irreducible individuality evidently means to carry a well-known romantic mask, which one may easily loose by acting in a “selfish” or “profit-oriented” manner.

However, by no means does such an exchange of identities lead to a dissolution of the borders of the individual, to an identity in flux, or to a decentering of the subject—postulates about which we hear so much these days. The subjects of the symbolic economy who exchange the signs of their personality certainly remain self-centered; they do not dissolve at all. To be sure, these submedial subjects repeatedly exchange their masks on the medial surface. Yet, at the same time, they can be adequately defined as carriers of symbolic exchange that occupy specific places in the topography of the medial surface. And they are defined above all by the fact that the symbolic exchange is performed in a warlike manner, that is, strategically, as Mauss continuously emphasizes.

This antagonistic component of the symbolic exchange is particularly evident in the phenomenon Mauss calls potlatch, using an old Indian word.⁵ The potlatch consists in an ostentatious, demonstrative, and seemingly aimless destruction of one’s own goods. When a chieftain destroys a part or even the entirety of his property and that of his tribe, then, according to the laws of symbolic economy, he obliges other chieftains to do the same in order to save face and maintain their social rank. Thus, a pure, “unproductive” destruction of wealth also becomes an economic action. At the same time, the potlatch demonstrates very clearly that the foundation of the symbolic economy is an aggressively waged competition in social recognition. Undoubtedly, such a competition yields winners and losers, because the extent of the sacrifice determines the social rank of the person who sacrifices. It may suffice at this point to recall some well-known sacrificial deeds—the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ and Socrates’s voluntary acceptance of his death sentence—to recognize the far-reaching obligations that may result from such sacrifices. Both Christianity and the tradition of European philosophy are based on these two sacrificial deeds. Both traditions continue to conjure the symbolic power of these deeds in order to legitimate their own privileged social position. Because God sacrificed himself for humanity through the body of Jesus Christ, Christians feel obligated to sacrifice themselves to God—or at least to obey him. The philosophical tradition, too, is ultimately based on a potlatch. Socrates’s death obliges other philosophers to think, that is, to adapt the specific methodical procedures that Socrates offered them as a gift and a legacy.

It is far from accidental that Friedrich Nietzsche, who sought to liberate himself from old debts in the name of a new way of thinking, tried again and again to diminish the symbolic value of Socrates’s and Jesus Christ’s self-sacrifices. With the help of “psychology,” Nietzsche tried to prove that Socrates, being a man of pure reason, had absolutely no concern for life, meaning that we cannot interpret his death as tragic or as giving rise to obligations. Nietzsche also described Christ “psychologically,” as a weakling for whom self-sacrifice was an inner psychological necessity and not a voluntary act that could oblige others.⁶ Nietzsche also envisioned the coming superhuman as the one who, by means of his own, freely willed doom, would finally liberate humanity from the old obligations while obligating humanity to embrace a new intensity of life.

The most interesting question here is certainly not whether Nietzsche was “right” with his revaluations, but how consistently his thought followed the logic of the symbolic economy. In his case, the aura of the hidden interior, of the media carrier, of the superhistorical moves from the signs of spirituality and reason to the signs of life and pure vitality—precisely by means of a new sacrifice that overcomes and annuls the old sacrifices through the potlatch that Nietzsche staged in his writings. Behind spirituality and reason, Nietzsche discovered life as a still more deeply hidden media carrier—a weak life, in fact, that still does not know anything about its supportive function. With the superhuman, by contrast, life achieves such power that even the death of the superhuman remains life affirming. Thus, life becomes the new, absolute, infinite media carrier, and all signs it sustains are obligated to it in the same manner.

Nietzsche’s writings inaugurated a historically unique potlatch of the historical avant-garde in which the biggest prize went to whoever was best able to renounce: to renounce mimesis in art, metaphysics in philosophy, narratives in literature, and so on. All of the reductionism of the historical avant-garde was nothing but a paroxysm of potlatch, not unlike that which caused Indian chieftains again and again to burn all their possessions, sparing nothing. Yet every one of these acts of potlatch discovered and established a new and infinite carrier of art that, for a brief time at least, elevated the artist who “discovered” this carrier—and who dedicated and sacrificed his life to this discovery—to the status of chieftain of the particular art scene in vogue at the time.

Obviously, it is entirely irrelevant in this context whether or not the person who sacrifices actually possesses the riches he ostentatiously destroys. Nietzsche accused the Christian ascetic and the rationalist philosopher of having too little life in them and thus of possessing nothing that could actually be sacrificed. If one does not have enough life within oneself, then indeed choosing Christian asceticism or rationalist morality does not seem to be such a big sacrifice. Hence, Nietzsche considered this kind of sacrifice to be a sham in which the person who sacrifices, in fact, only pretends to sacrifice, because he actually lacks that which he allegedly sacrifices. The same charge was often leveled against the artistic avant-garde, namely that these artists did not actually possess the mastery, ability and knowledge of the very tradition they allegedly renounced voluntarily. In this case, too, we are dealing w...