Good signs so far from Carlin Barton’s Roman Honor. I’ve read several chapters of this previously, as background for a seminar paper on ethos, audience, and rhetorical coercion in Cicero’s Pro Ligario, and it’s as fine as I remember it. Before looking at the implications of a few early quotations, let me try to propose what I’m after here: I want to use the concerns of Tacitus about power, subjectivities, and truth-production to metaphorically address the potentialities and pitfalls of democratic discourse on the Web, especially in relation — again — to power, subjectivity, and truth-production, but with today’s added economic component, and Barton can help me in understanding how the Romans publically and rhetorically constructed individual and social subjectivities. The missing part of the equation — the donut-hole of a hypothesis I’ll be working towards, with the help of Hardt & Negri — is how we, today, on the Web, publically and rhetorically and economically construct individual and social subjectivities, and whether such constructions have political consequences that were absent under the Roman empire.
Barton notes that “In our world, [. . .] ‘passionate’ and ‘practical’ are opposites. But it was exactly the Roman love of action, their libido vivendi, that attuned them to the emotions as the greatest levers, the motores, of action. It was the Romans’ commitment to, their immersion in the world, that gave the emotions motive and explanatory force. What we, with our ideal of freedom from the befuddling fumes of passion, might ascribe to politics or economics, class or gender, the Romans would attribute to fear, desire, shame, arrogance, ambition, envy, greed, love, or lust” (2). Heh. Yeah, so you can already see why I like her: she shows the obverse of my theoretical coin, and casts my contemporary perspective into sharp relief via the people who fascinate me most. Helllo, alterity.
She goes on to suggest that “the categories of explanation that we find most stable and satisfying, most ‘concrete,’ had, for that very reason, very little motive power for the Romans. We like to isolate and fix our motives; the Romans liked them to move” (3). Furthermore, “because neither the emotions, nor the soul, nor our selves as public objects or intersubjective formulations are clear and controllable, we reject them as ultimate sources of value and explanation. But the restless Romans, on account of their elaborate systems of reciprocities, though less in terms of synchronic structures than in terms of motion, tension, torsion. The spirit (animus) and the existence of one’s self as a social subject (fama) were the airy stuff of the really real for the Romans precisely because they were — like all great forces of the universe — volatile and fugitive, impossible, finally, to domesticate” (4). To the composition of this charged and emotional society, add one final element: in a city without a police force, “the Roman body politic was regulated by the warm physical glow of the blush” (Barton 19). The work of emotion was always publicly performed, and in the republic, the political position of censor — the public shamer — was one of ultimate importance. In our post-Freudian society of the spectacle, with the importance we attach to privacy and the concomitant elevation of guilt as a motivating preventative moral force, we are today less interested in how a society might shape its inhibitions around public shame rather than private guilt.
Guilt works via individualism, privacy, introspection, ownership: I did this. Shame is communal, public, rhetorical, shared: we see that you did this.
And how do weblogs, and the Web, fit into such a picture?
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