It has been a while since I have written about the public discourse around sexual and gender-based violence and abuse. That’s because most of the points I would have wished to make have been made by more prominent, respected, articulate people than me, which is good. The point of these series on my blog is to fill gaps in leftist public discourse, not to serve as a microcosm thereof. Naturally, then, it is disappointing to feel the need to write anything about this. It suggests if not a total absence, a considerable lacuna in leftist thought on a matter. In this case, the absence pertains to embarrassing comeback attempts, something that, as the Gary Coleman of BC politics, I feel I have a special affinity for and might, then, offer a clearer and more precise contribution to.
In September 2018, Jian Ghomeshi wrote an article for the New York Review of Books; true to form, it was narcissistic, self-congratulatory and deceptive. In it, Ghomeshi asked rhetorically asked how long he should continue to be punished for his acts by being excluded from the public square as a public intellectual and broadcaster, given that he had not been criminally convicted of the assaults of which he had been accused. This viewpoint was echoed by trolls disguised as newspaper columnists.
There was context for this. Fans of Louis CK, who had admitted to using his financial power over several women to get them to let him masturbate in front of them and had offered a tepid apology for the affair, substituting “admiration” for “financial power” in his statement. People wanted to know: just how long before we “let” Louis CK get back to his career as a celebrity stand-up comic.
As typically takes place when questions of gender-based abuse and violence find their way into the public square, people quickly adopted a wholly inappropriate metaphorical vocabulary: that of the criminal justice system. Somehow, not getting paid to be on stage, on the radio or on TV constitutes some form of punishment or “sentence” that badly-behaving male celebrities are serving out when their shows get canceled after they do something inappropriate. And when the sentence is completed, it follows that they get to go back to being paid millions of dollars to be on screen.
This optic is, of course, an insane one to apply to highly coveted jobs that very few people ever get to do. People have a right to move about freely; only through a grave transgression of the law are they temporarily stripped of that right. But nobody has the right to be on stage; nobody has the right to be popular; nobody has the right to have their own TV show. And, central to the Louis CK case, nobody has a right to force anyone to watch them.
And yet, this metaphor of the “life sentence” has been used repeatedly to talk about male celebrities who crossed an important ethical or legal line in their treatment of women. The same metaphor is used, the same kinds of questions are asked about Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and a host of others. And yet, when one considers Polanski and Allen, the framing seems even more absurd: Allen and Polanski continue to be famous directors in whose movies major Hollywood and European stars appear; they continue to receive flattering interviews and other media attention; they even continue receiving major international awards for their work.
What punishment, then, were they actually suffering? What, exactly, was being described as a “sentence”? The answer is this: a lot of people have kept thinking they are creeps and some of those people have stopped watching their movies. And, at the end of the day, what this is really about is that there is a shockingly large number of people who believe that not being thought-of as a creep is a right that all men enjoy, that can only be revoked temporarily and only under the most extreme circumstances.
The Incel movement shares with the mainstream of North American society the belief that men own other people’s thoughts about them, that when someone thinks “that guy’s greasy,” that thought does not belong to the person thinking it but rather to the person to whom it pertains. This is the most extraordinary breach of individual selfhood and the liberal theory of the base unit and yet, such a view epitomizes the changes in social contract we associate with late capitalism and has been, from the beginning, embedded in the project of capitalist modernity.
One of the most underestimated thinkers in adumbrating the roots of the modern capitalist state is Irene Silverblatt, a holocaust survivor writing in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Silverblatt argues that many of the seeds of an incipient capitalist modernity are to be found not in early modern Europe’s core but in its periphery, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. It is here that modern ideas of race-thinking first played out and here that modern understandings of bureaucracy – with the technocrat as transactor of knowledge – appeared at their most thoroughly elaborated.
The Spanish society that arrived in the New World was already accustomed to the highest levels of cosmopolitanism and diversity in Europe; it contained Basques, Catalans and many other ethnicities whose languages would eventually be subsumed within Castilian Spain. It contained Christians, Jews and Muslims who had been enmeshed in a seven-century religious war known as the Reconquista. Spaniards descended from Roman colonists, some from Carthaginians, some from Goths, some from Franks, Vandals, Berbers and Arabs. Medieval Spain had been a hierarchical place in which people were treated differently depending on honor or calidad; sometimes that honor was created by present-day behaviour, sometimes inherited from one’s macro-lineage group, one’s raza (the origin of the term and idea of race). Like the rest of Europe it was a world of knights, lords, kings, peasants, urban labourers and the beginnings of a bourgeoisie. Some of the labouring worked in high-status clean jobs like millers while others worked in “unclean” jobs like tanners (the clean-unclean distinction pervaded the whole civilized world and, in India, had resulted in the creation of the dalit or “untouchable” caste).
The society the Spanish discovered in the Andes was every bit as complex as their own, organized into macro-lineage groups called allyus, headed by a dead ancestor, the most powerful of whom were mummified and periodically consulted by the living allyu head. When the Spanish arrived they had to both dominate Andean culture and integrate it with their own, subordinate noble families and marry into them, perceive enough of Andean society to surveil and dominate it and yet radically simplify it legally, administratively and conceptually. Furthermore, the African slaves conquistadors brought with them had to have a place in this new world too.
One of the first consequences of this project was something known as a limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) certificate. This certificate acted upon one’s casta (caste). The Spanish crown had created six major castes in its New World colonies: Español (white), indio (indigenous), negro (black), mestizo (mixed white and indigenous), mulato (mixed white and black) and zambo (mixed indigenous and black). Anyone in possession of such a certificate was, according to the state, white, from a legal perspective, making one eligible for any political office, impossible to enslave (unlike negros) and subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition (unlike indios). (More on this aspect of Spanish imperial society two posts from now.)
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These certificates soon became a commodity in their own right. With the right amount of money, one could purchase such a certificate from a corrupt government official and make that money back within not too much time as one’s employment and entrepreneurial prospects expanded. And that is not just because of how such certificates acted in a formal, legal sense. Although Jews were not part of the North American caste system devised by the Spanish and their immigration was supposedly prohibited, it was understood that some had entered the territory as “Portuguese,” because the adjacent Portuguese Empire, which handled the slave trade for Spain, looked the other way when it came to Jews passing for non-Jews. A limpieza de sangre certificate did not merely attest to the European descent of a person—it attested to a lineage that had never been tainted by Jewish blood, Muslim conversion or work in an unclean industry.
And such certificates did not merely act on one’s fate when the law spelled-out caste-based privileges. They affected the credibility of one’s testimony in court and before the inquisition. They affected whether one was invited to a cabildo (the assembly of Spanish notables who constituted the city fathers of a self-governing town). They affected one’s marriage prospects and a host of other things to which they had no technical pertinence.
It is here, then, under the aegis of the Hapsburgs’ New World empire that we first see the large-scale and systematic modern commodification of reputation, the idea that one can, though good behaviour and good luck or though money, own the portion of others’ opinion that pertains to oneself.
But as with so many other things about the early modern world, what began in Spain came to be more fully elaborated in Britain. Whereas one can trace the spreading of false news or declarations likely to breach the peace as an offense against the state or society to the Age of the Antonines in second century Rome, the privatization of this offense in the form of defamation or libel came into being haltingly.
There does not appear to be any moment that the common law tradition from which English law descends did not recognize slanderous speech to be an injury. As I have suggested elsewhere, the Germanic wergild tradition of law, in which injuries to the person were quantified monetarily and justice meted out through financial compensation gave societies based on it a leg up in internalizing the logic of capitalism, having the foundation of a proto-capitalist legal system. But wergild quantified only one aspect of reputation: reputational depreciation. Changes in reputation that were positive or simply alterations in kind or type of status were outside the purview of the wergild system.
More importantly, the English legal system only compensated those whose reputations depreciated due to a falsehood being circulated about them. While the onus of demonstrating the truth or falsity of an accusation has moved back and forth between plaintiff and defendant throughout the history of libel and slander law, the veracity of an accusation has always had the capacity to vitiate the claim of compensation for lost reputation.
When the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi first became public, the representatives he engaged were not lawyers, rather, they were representatives of the public relations firm, Navigator, a company specializing in “crisis communications” as they pertain to people containing blood and organs, as opposed to the corporations for which the field was first developed. Under the slogan “Navigator: When You Can’t Afford to Lose,” the firm’s web site succinctly explains its purpose: “Corporations and individuals sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. We quickly pull together the right team to manage issues before they escalate into major crises. When disaster strikes, our clients depend on our custom-built communications plans to minimize reputational damage.” The site goes on to offer a do-it-yourself program under the header “Sign Up for our Crisis Preparation and Reputation Recovery Program with Ivey Business School.”
Ultimately, Ghomeshi was too undisciplined for Navigator to handle, but many prominent Canadians like Michael Bryant, the Ontario Attorney-General who killed a mentally ill indigenous cyclist with his car, have benefited significantly from the expansion of reputational management from correcting falsehood to preserve reputation to burnishing it for the same purpose. Across the border, we recently witnessed the sudden reappraisal of a group of Catholic School boys’ confrontation with an indigenous war veteran at a protest in Washington DC. Columnists and news organizations quickly issued mea culpas for their portrayal of the young men as boorish racists, following a recontextualization of some video footage by RunSwitch PR, a Navigator-like firm hired by some of the boys’ parents.
RunSwitch, which goes by the motto “to ensure the right people know the right thing,” was able to perform a kind of reputational alchemy for a hefty fee. Whereas libel law and the work of firms like Navigator has traditionally been used to safeguard a reputation with pre-existing value against depreciation, the alchemy performed by RunSwitch transformed a boy whose name we did not know, with a forgettable face into an Anglo American media star who, for the first time, was given a platform to espouse the conservative views he had gone to Washington to help advance. In this way, RunSwitch’s work did not work like an intervention by Navigator or a libel lawyer but instead like a limpieza de sagre certificate.
While the name of the boy’s school had been known, his name, Nick Sandmann, was not, until RunSwitch entered the fray. In this way, something more than the defensive action of a Navigator campaign was in evidence: one individual was transformed into a celebrity with a national reputation because fashioning this spokesperson was the most efficient way to defend his school and classmates. But within this instrumentalist reasoning is something deeper: Sandmann’s presumed right to be well-regarded, irrespective of evidence before the very eyes of those judging him.
This is what Ghomeshi’s defenders desire too: to nullify the words of the women who described his brutal acts, to substitute our prior opinion of him for one that we have come to using evidence and our God-given reason because our current opinions hurt “his” reputation. This arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what reputation is and what it is for. “Your” reputation does not and should not belong to you. It belongs to the people whom you encounter, people who are alone with you in elevators or alleys, people you split restaurant bills with, people in the passenger seat of your car. These people own your reputation because they build it; they maintain it; and they are the ones who need it. You see: the purpose of your reputation is to inform people of how to protect their safety when they interact with you. It was never yours, nor should it be.
