on the politics of gossip and the end of privacy

rgr-pop:

Spontaneous, decentered, and multivocal, gossip is antithetical to developmental narrative. It seizes details and hyperbolizes their importance; it defies the notion of information as property. Gossip exemplifies both antinarrative and antirepresentational strategies that dehierarchize linear narrative accounts, both orientalist and nationalist, with a popular, multiple record of very different kinds of activities and modes of social organization.
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For those pragmatically in need of instruments with which to stay in power, gossip is acknowledged to be a more valuable discourse than a discourse of “truth.” Yet defying possession by a single owner and moving easily across the class boundaries that express the concept of property, gossip is always in circulation, without assignable source and without trajectory or closure. Mobile and promiscuous, it collects significance as it travels from site to site; orality and speed make it “common” and yet difficult to detect or trace.

Gossip often plagiarizes, and in so doing satirizes, official civil institutions: government, marriage, family, the law. Adultery, bastardy, homosexuality, criminality, intoxication, profanity—each corresponds to the tropological structure of gossip, which cites the official and yet is in excess of it; these affinities underline the location of gossip as the terrain of these activities. As it is parasitic on the details of “private” life, it derides the separation of public and private spheres, transgressing these separations symbolic of bourgeois order. Since gossip isun written, it does not respond to demands of linguistic purity; it deviates from the laws of national languages, as well as from the linguistic separations of proper “high” language and “low” colloquialisms.

- Lisa Lowe, “Decolonization, Displacement, and Disidentification,” in Immigrant Acts.

For Aria, but relevant to everyone and everything we do and say. I hope you guys like Lisa Lowe, ‘cause I’ve been really into Lisa Lowe. This chapter is way important to every #theory I work on.