Abstract
This chapter spotlights public shaming blogs as echoes of the Menippean satire tradition. Like, for example, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, public shaming sites provide their readers a curious service: dissecting, bemoaning and paradoxically substantiating abnormal behavior after that behavior is shown to be woven inextricably into normativity. While these “encomiums” of shame-worthy behavior seem to invite readers to dwell on the problems of hatred, ignorance and hypocrisy as constant threats to social welfare, their structural aesthetics obscure this invitation. Readers of blogs, like readers of Anatomy, find themselves tumbling toward Burton’s charitable horror, his stupid humanism that suggests it is almost as foolish to reject abnormality proven to be universal as it is foolish to endorse it, but since endorsement offers the consolation of company alongside the challenge of charity, we ought to choose the greater of two follies as the lesser of two evils.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Public shaming online is increasingly common, and sites devoted to assembling shame-worthy behaviors vary in scope and substance: minor acts of ignorance or inconsideration are catalogued as often as reprehensible performances of intolerance (though the boundaries between these acts are not perfectly distinct, as this chapter will go on to explore). Titles of shame-based microblogs or collections include dumbesttweets.com; White Whine: A Collection of First World Problems; N Train Gossip; Shit Rich College Kids Say; White People Rioting Over Stupid Shit; 100 Real Tweets from Homophobes Who Would Murder Their Gay Child; Top 50 Homophobic Chick-Fil-A Tweets; This is White Privilege. See also journalist Jon Ronson’s recently published bestseller, So You’ve Been Publically Shamed (Riverhead Books, 2015).
- 2.
See “Americans Call First Indian American Miss America Winner a Terrorist,” posted September 16, 2013 on Public Shaming.
- 3.
Ong goes on to draw connections between copia and “normal nonacademic oral activity,” which explains why “Renaissance works proposing expressly to develop copia are often curiously elementary” (29).
- 4.
Erasmus is dismissive of much non-scholarly material, the “rubbish” that consists of “all those unedifying falsehoods taken from popular story-books, and all those crazy tales and fantasies of a risqué sort—all those things we learned as children, sitting with our grandfathers or grandmothers, or with nurses and girls at their spinning” (On Education for Children ). It is likely Erasmus would dismiss internet discourse as equally unedifying, too tainted by a vulgar vernacular to serve as anything more than a distraction from serious study. About the Renaissance period, Earle Havens notes that many commonplace books of the period:
were little more than loosely gathered scraps of everything and anything, sewn together and sandwiched between protective boards. These more undisciplined and disorganized commonplace books appeared in every permutation and degree of sophistication, and included nearly every imaginable type of text: lines of epic poetry, lofty quotations, and, just as often, medicinal and culinary recipes, ribald couplets, hermetical numerical tables, cartoons, monumental inscriptions, magical spells, bad jokes; in short, all the literary flotsam and jetsam of the more vigorous sort of reader. (9–10)
- 5.
This not to say that no other Erasmian texts preach a doctrine of charity and a rhetoric of toleration, but it is Folly who most devotedly takes on the limitations of a humanist program straining “to accept otherness while upholding absolute truth” (Hampton 63). Timothy Hampton suggests that Christian humanism “offers no terms for defining action in a world not characterized by friendship among likes … a world characterized by difference rather than similarity” (60–61). Folly does not supply these terms—nothing so straightforward as that—but she does expand the classification of similarity even to the point that difference, despite its enduring illegibilities, can be accommodated.
- 6.
Still relevant for twenty-first-century readers is the “customary metaphor of the bee at work, taking goodness from all kinds of flowers, as it had been used by Cicero and Quintilian” (Charlton 456). See Kenneth Charlton’s “ ‘False Fonde Bookes, Ballades and Rimes’: An Aspect of Informal Education in Early Modern England” for more on the early modern justifications for popular consumption.
- 7.
One physician, Laurent Joubert, published Erreurs Populaires (1578), a collection of popular traditions, superstitions and misconceptions primarily concerning health and medicine. It includes the chapter headings “Why it is said that whoever refuses a pregnant woman something will get a sty in his eye” and “Why it is said that when someone has a nosebleed he will soon hear some good news.” See Joubert, L. & G. de Rocher. Popular Errors. The University of Alabama Press, 2006.
- 8.
Thus Burton diverts from the purpose of early anatomizing experiments and the confidence that the process of anatomizing was “logically the most sure guide to knowledge in general” (Williams 594). Eugene Kirk points out that the term “anatomy” was not entirely clear-cut in the period—it was a “rubric for poems, treatises, Euphuistic novels, geographies, pamphlets, prose polemics, devotional works—in short, for such a variety of forms as to render hopeless any idea that ‘anatomy’ ever implied a specific genre” (qtd. in Musgrave 9). Still, we can point to a prevailing anticipation that “the anatomical specimen” would serve as “a universalized body,” that anatomizing was a “systemizing” approach “to the diversity of human kind … an advantageous way to ‘know’ human kind” (Traub 57, 59).
- 9.
Though it does not make use of the word ambient, James Brown’s insightful analysis of Erasmus’s eloquence training program in the De Copia—particularly Erasmus’s assertion that “[p]ractice will result in [commonplaces] suggesting themselves automatically in a never ending series” (67)—leads Brown to similar conclusions about rhetorical activity (whom and what it involves): “The student, according to Erasmus, will move through space, examining commonplaces, but that process is an emergent one during which the appropriate topos will produce itself voluntarily, coming forth on its own, for its own sake, or of its own will … [I]t is not entirely clear if the student or the topoi themselves are trained” (500). Brown finds that “Erasmus’s focus on the machinations of rhetoric nudges us closer to an ontological framework that is attuned to the processes by which an object operates rather than to one that determines which type of objects are worthy of attention” (505, my emphasis). For the student of copia, as for the reader and writer of Anatomy, invention is not imposed; it emerges.
- 10.
Not a monstrous knowledge, as Williams concludes after noting Anatomy’s failure to “conform to synecdochic logic” (600). When the relationship between parts and whole is disfigured to the extent that it is in Anatomy, Williams says, the reader suffers a “disorientation comparable to that of a traveler who has lost his direction in a foreign country: the reader loses his sense of self” (600). I would revise this to suggest that the ambient rhetoric of Anatomy indeed forces a reader to lose his/her sense of self as a reader and to gain a sense of self as an inventor, generating the logic of the text as he/she moves through it.
- 11.
To this we might add Donald Kimball Smith’s assertion that the early modern “geographic context … is one that no longer orders itself around the still center of Jerusalem, and without God as the center point, the world makes sense only in relation to itself” (170). See also Adam Max Cohen’s discussion of the globe as an overdetermined symbol in this era: “It was routinely invoked to represent travel, exploration, discovery, the classical past, the potential for empire, learning, the individual, the stage, the nation, the earth, and the cosmos” (59).
- 12.
Angus Gowland labels Burton a “moderately skeptical humanist” (Worlds 27) whose satirical display of conflicting authorities is “rooted in the longstanding Christian contempt for worldly wisdom” (Worlds 26), but I don’t believe that this designation goes far enough. Burton is more than a skeptic; he is a stupid humanist, not content to “turn everything he found in the course of his learned investigation to his particular purpose” (Worlds 27), but endeavoring, in fact, to do almost the opposite—investigate his “particular purpose” as an emergent phenomenon rather than a known commitment he must doggedly, piously pursue or else abandon out of pessimism or despair.
- 13.
“stupidity, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, September 2016. Accessed 31 October 2016.
- 14.
I agree with Lund, who acknowledges that “there are disruptions in the Anatomy,” but “resists the view made popular by [Stanley] Fish that contradiction and undercutting are the governing principles” of the text (5). Burton’s concluding words are proof not of contradiction but of his unique focus “not on [readers’] lives beyond the text but rather on their experience of reading the Anatomy, subsuming individual differences into a greater sense of essential likeness” (Lund 2).
- 15.
Melancholy and intelligence do intersect in this period. Drew Daniel notes that “this condition had acquired centuries of intellectual prestige” (5), such that the melancholic persona became fashionable among scholars and elites. Matthew Bell calls fashionable melancholy a “minority phenomenon” that has been exaggerated in scholarship, but concedes that some early moderns adopted melancholic postures and styles: “Elizabethan men stood with their arms crossed, wore black and disheveled clothing, and pulled their hats down over their eyes” (190). See also Cynthia Marshall’s “Man of Steel Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1993, pp. 385–408. Gowland has much to say on the prominence of melancholy as a diagnosis; he suggests that “concerns about widespread melancholy were intimately bound up with perceptions of the world” among intellectuals, namely perceptions regarding the relationship between “the breakdown of psychic harmony” and “the disintegration of the harmony in society as a whole” (“The Problem” 117).
- 16.
“smart, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Accessed 31 October 2016.
- 17.
We might compare this lack of utility to a similar lack in Renaissance note-taking (though of course the content of the notes would be quite different). “Starting in the Renaissance,” Blair points out, “notes were treated less as temporary tools than as long-term ones, worthy of … being saved for reuse and in some cases shared with others … Collections of notes were valued as treasuries or storehouses in which to accumulate information even if they did not serve an immediate purpose. This stockpiling approach to note-taking also required greater attention to organization and finding devices since the precise uses to which the notes might be put were not clear from the outset and the scale of accumulation hampered memorization” (63).
- 18.
Twitter replaced the original, star-shaped “favorite” button with the heart-shaped “like” button in 2015. Product manager Akarshan Kumar explained the change on Twitter’s blog:
We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we’ll be calling them likes. We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite. The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones.
It’s interesting that Kumar notes the confusion that can result from having to mark everything “your favorite,” but doesn’t anticipate the more acute confusion that results from having to “like” what you profoundly may not.
- 19.
While the “like” option is deficient from the standpoint of rhetorical competency, it has the advantage of being codified through the social media platform interface. Shamers, then, might enjoy the advantage, for what it’s worth, of only “feeling inarticulate” as a result of the expressive limitations of available social codes, rather than knowing, with certainty, their own illegitimacy.
- 20.
“like, v.2.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Accessed 31 October 2016.
- 21.
The “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry” reaction emojis added to Facebook in 2016 do not erase these connections, but they may obscure opportunities for recognition. I myself was pleased with Facebook’s decision not to include a “dislike” button, though for very different reasons than the ones offered by CEO Mark Zuckerberg , whose strange description of a “dislike” button as a “voting mechanism” suggests a concern to do what is good for corporate advertisers more than “for the community:”
Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to be able to say, “That thing isn’t good.” That’s not something that we think is good. We’re not going to build that, and I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism on Facebook about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s socially very valuable or good for the community to help people share the important moments in their lives. (Zuckerberg, qtd. in David Cohen)
- 22.
The description suggests not only prudence but medical insight. Wolfe summarizes “the Hippocratic physiological principle that laughter is ‘born of two contraries’ rather than out of one single emotion or physiological mechanism. Produced by a ‘contrariety or battle of two feelings,’ such as joy and sorrow, laughter is the result of two conflicting physical impulses, the alternating contraction and dilation of the chest” (Wolfe Homer 143). This in mind, Democritus Jr.’s claim that “our whole course of life is but matter of laughter” (Preface 45) seems not entirely flippant.
- 23.
Richard Lanham insists with similar intensity on recognizing a new economics of attention: “[Rhetoric] has traditionally been defined as the art of persuasion. It might as well, though, have been called the economics of attention …. [I]n a society where information and stuff have changed places, it proves useful to think of rhetoric precisely as such, as a new economics. How could it be otherwise? If information is now our basic ‘stuff,’ must not our thinking about human communication become economic thinking?” (21).
- 24.
Some legal questions are addressed in Marlisse Silver Sweeney’s “What the Law Can (and Can’t) Do About Online Harassment” in The Atlantic, 12 November 2014. For an investigation into the ethics of public shaming, see Jennifer Jacquet’s Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool, Vintage Books, 2015.
- 25.
I add the caveat that my analysis concerns the network logic of public shaming sites specifically, as opposed to every single social media site that invites public commentary. I am most interested in sites where shame and shaming intersect with copia, in other words. The lone troll who hijacks a comment thread of a Chronicle of Higher Ed article, the men’s rights activist who takes to Twitter or Reddit or 4chan to threaten a female social justice warrier with rape, Julian Assange indulging his misogyny through Wikileaks—these shameless shamers are outside the scope of my argument. For now.
- 26.
Ronson certainly emphasizes the damage and ruinous consequences of public shaming in Ronson, Jon. So You’ve Been Publically Shamed. Riverhead Books, 2015.
- 27.
We might compare “one bajillion examples of white privilege” to explicitly poetic attempts to approach information overload, such as Raymond Queneau’s avant-garde work One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, in which a set of 10 sonnets can be combined to form 1014 sonnets. Paul Stephens interprets the work as a response to a culture of information overload: “No final meaning can be assigned to a poem whose very parameters exceed the attentional capacities of its readers. But this is not to say that the poem is without meaning.” See “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Data” in Guernica (guernicamag.com, 15 July 2015).
- 28.
Again, see Paul Stephens, who seeks out “updated defamiliarization techniques [that] might allow for recognizing new ways of navigating an increasingly commodified infosphere” (Poetics 12).
- 29.
For a different take on Burton’s attitude toward publication and anonymity, see Christopher Mead, “Content to be Pressed”: Robert Burton and the editio princeps hominis, Representations, vol. 129, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–24.
- 30.
To dox, or doxx, is to publish the private contact information of the social media user being shamed.
- 31.
Consider the 2014 Washington Post-ABC News poll that found a majority of religious Americans believe the CIA’s torture of suspected terrorists after 9/11 was and is justified. See “Majority says CIA harsh interrogations justified,” The Washington Post, 4 January 2015. Accessed 29 June 2015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hoffmann, C. (2017). The Anatomy of Public Shaming . In: Stupid Humanism. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63751-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63751-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63750-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63751-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)