pictures of topless Kate Middleton, presumably shot by French
paparazza Valérie S.)
(PHOTO 2: An unidentified woman carjacker mobbed and stripped naked in
downtown Nairobi about a week ago)
***
A twister of Victorian rage triggered by photos of monokini-clad Kate
Middleton has swept over Great Britain these past few days, leaving in
its path free speech severely scathed in... France!
France, where the gossip magazine Closer--owned by ex-Italian PM
Silvio Berlusconi--first published the topless pictures.
And where a court has since fined Closer and ordered it to hand over
originals of those photos to the princely couple.
To just show the futility of this ruling, the princely topless photos
are ubiquitous on the Internet and copies of the issue of Closer
magazine are "up for grabs on e-Bay," according to news reports.
What's more, Chi--the other Berlusconi-owned gossip mag--has since
picked up where its sister publication has left, turning the court
ruling into a Sisyphean farce.
Pull-outs of the topless photos have been included in tabloids in
Ireland and are also set to be published in Denmark and Sweden.
A "hollow victory" of the princely couple in France, as a London
tabloid has aptly quipped.
In the U.K., there's a nascent movement of French bashing; a hunt for
The "Rat" (paparrazo), reported gone into hiding, is launched; a
boycott of French goods may be afoot; Berlusconi is once more a
whipping boy; and there's even talk of a "diplomatic row" with Italy!
British wrath over the Satanic Photos has even kicked the murderous
outrage over the infamous anti-Muslim movie out of news cycles.
And the North-African Al-Qaeda affiliate call for assassinations of
American ambassadors had barely registered in the firestorm.
All this rage over grainy pictures shot by a paparazza with a Canon
telephoto-lens camera from a mile away!
Oh my, the hypocrisy!
Both British tabloids and high-brow media have even conspired to not
publish those topless photos.
And if you go to their Web sites, you won't get any links to the
pictures or to the magazines that published them or still host them on
their sites.
You'd only find self-cannibalizing, self-referential hyperlinks
relating to their previous outrage over the topless photos.
A while back, it was a different game altogether, when British
tabloids scrambled for the naked photos of Berlusconi.
Anyway, I don't know what the princely couple expect to achieve with
these frivolous lawsuits in this Age of Digital Reproduction, to
paraphrase the title of Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Incidentally, in that essay, the words "close," "closer," and
"up-close" recur quite a few times--as shoutouts before the fact at
Closer magazine.
Benjamin posits that in the past works of art and natural objects had
"authenticity" and "aura" conferred to them by the "distance" from the
beholder.
But with the advent of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (ushered in
by still photography and motion-picture), that aura "withers" and the
distance to the beholder has vanished.
These technologies of Mechanical Reproduction caused a sea change in
the mind-set of people, in the history of mentality.
People--Benjamin call them "contemporary masses"--now want to draw
things "closer" to them and to "[overcome] the uniqueness of every
reality by accepting its reproduction."
Says Benjamin:
"Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very
close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction."
Benjamin was writing in 1936, in the prehistory of modern-day
technologies of reproduction.
(Other thinkers have come with new concepts to describe the same
reality Benjamin was pointing to.
From Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle to Régis Debray's
Mediat Society--to just name those two.)
In this Age of Digital Reproduction, this "desire" for closeness with
objects by mass reproduction has reached fever-pitch urgency.
I don't recall Benjamin ever mentioning in that essay the violence
entailed in this craving for immediacy, though he talks about the
crafting of aura by celebrities off stage and off cinemas.
A violence akin to the ripping violence imagined by British novelist
Peter F. Hamilton in the sci-fi trilogy "The Night's Dawn."
In Hamilton's trilogy, a "reality dysfunction" suddenly occurs in a
remote space colony whereby souls trapped in the torments of the
beyond come back to possess the bodies of the living.
And the possession is spreading all over the inhabited planetary
systems like an unstoppable virus.
People learn from those returned souls that naked souls stuck in
Purgatory live in perpertual torment as other souls pry into all the
emotions and memories they'd experienced while still in the vessels of
their human bodies.
That's the kind of prying violence celebrities are experiencing in
their daily lives at the hands of paparrazi and the "contemporary
masses" that feed on the red meat being thrown at them.
It comes with the terrority as the adage has it.
And there are no categories in celebrities.
Lady Di is just as fair game as Lady Gaga or as Mitt Romney at the
Boca Raton fundraiser.
We're all shoulder-to-shoulder in these Wuthering Flats--you, me, and
monokini-clad Victorian bodies.
That craving for immediacy is also what fuels the urge for
transparency of both whistleblowers and hackers.
I relish reading the diplomatic immediacies brought to me at the
nearest Internet access by WikiLeaks--despite the "harm" it may cause
to US interests worldwide.
The explosion of the Internet; and the possibility of instant
democratic, unrestricted access to everything by everyone. This is
grand!
By the way, some hackers would pretty much enjoy the immediacy of your
bank account.
Unable to penetrate the vaults of Wall Street, the OccupyWallStreeters
go to the immediate vicinity of Wall Street.
Things are out there and it's up to you to uncover them, to grab them,
to bring them near to us, and to them to share with others.
I read somewhere that there's a new school of British
artists-theorists called "The New Aesthetics," who are able to account
for all these occurrences in the Age of Digital Reproduction.
I'm curious to know what their take would be about the hoo-haa over
the topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge.
Now, look at the second photo above.
The unnamed woman, caught as she and her gang were in the process of
broad daylight carjacking in the streets of downtown Nairobi, was
mobbed and stripped naked.
This is real naked and raw violence--perpetrated by the crowd, the
photographer, and by the consumer of violence that I am, who force you
to share this violence with me!
We live in an age where to even conceive of the Aura of objects like
the boobs of the Duchess of Cambridge is idiotic.
The Brits, who have invented tabloids, ought to know that there are no
such things as prudish closeted "Victorian" bodies in the Age of
Digital Reproduction.
***
Photo Credits: Chi
Via: www.mondadori.com/Group/Magazines/Italy/Chi ; & kenyan-post.com
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