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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumors against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court – it was like fighting shadows. The moment was iconic: Socrates, the harbinger of logos and true knowledge, was eventually defeated by rumors and mendacious slander.
Where does the strange power of rumors come from? Everyone knows that rumors are unfounded and based on thin air, but still they pass them on: rumors spread, and what appeared as a small breeze can grow into a mighty whirlwind and produce serious effects, ruin people’s lives and change the course of events. This book scrutinizes the mysterious power of rumors and seeks to analyse it philosophically, examining along the way some key moments of our cultural history concerning rumors, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Gogol and Kafka. It also underlines the fact that, although rumors are as old as humankind, the advent of the internet and social media has raised the spreading of rumors to an entirely new level, to the point where we could speak of the rumorization of the social. The more communication there is, the more the social fabric threatens to fall apart – and the more urgent it becomes to find strategies to counteract this.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Textual start
From breeze to storm
Fighting the shadows
Rumors and capital
Three Shakespearean rumors
Figaro’s triumph
Rousseau and the birth of conspiracy theories
The trials of Josef K.
The canine theory of language
Rumors and immortality
Gossip
Idle talk
Lost illusions
The demise of the big Other?
Acknowledgment
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Theory Redux series
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Published Titles
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Alfie Bown, Post-Comedy
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Diedrich Diederichsen, Aesthetics of Pop Music
Mladen Dolar, Rumors
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Fabian Muniesa, Paranoid Finance
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Gerald Raunig, Making Multiplicity
Helen Rollins, Psychocinema
Avital Ronell, America
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal
Rumors
Mladen Dolar
polity
Copyright © Mladen Dolar 2025
The right of Mladen Dolar to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6171-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024939673
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
To take rumors as a serious object of theoretical scrutiny and philosophical reflection seems like a contradiction in terms. It’s true that, as Hegel says, philosophy can start anywhere – it only matters how one does it, so that there is in principle no topic that couldn’t become the object of philosophical scrutiny, provided that one does it properly, at the level of the concept. But can rumors acquire the dignity of a concept? It would rather seem that there is an either–or: either one deals with rumors or one does philosophy. They appear to be mutually exclusive. What could be further away from the high mission and dignity of philosophy than paying attention to rumors, gossip, hearsay, tittle-tattle, slander, calumny, prattle, denigration? If one deals with such an unworthy and undignified subject, isn’t this a sure way to ruin one’s philosophical reputation? So here I am, risking my philosophical reputation – which I guess is not a bad thing at all – to propose considering rumors as an ontological entity, as it were, a concept with far-reaching implications and ramifications that bears on the elementary nature of social bonds, the nature of language, the nature of knowledge, and ultimately the nature of our present predicament, which can be termed, as I will argue, the general rumorization of society.
To start with, here is a little story indicating the all-pervasiveness of rumors and even extending their impact to the most elementary level of being: subatomic particles and quantum physics. In 1993 the British science minister announced that he would give a bottle of champagne to the person who would best describe the Higgs field and the notorious Higgs boson (aka “the God particle”). The winning entry, by David Miller at UCL, ran like this:
In a cocktail party, this kind of excitation might move through the crowd if a rumor spread from one end to the other. People nearest the rumor-originator would lean in to hear it. They would then pass it along to their neighbors, drawing together a new clump of people, and then return to their original positions to discuss it. The compression of the crowd would move from one end of the room to the other, like a Higgs boson in a Higgs field.1
So there we have it: what is the God particle but a rumor spread at the subatomic underside of objectivity? The God particle, allegedly detaining the last secrets of the universe, turns out to have the structure of mere gossip. One can’t even explain quantum physics without recourse to rumors. There is no “ontological consistency” to the rumor, if one can use such a term here, its only function is that of clumping and clustering entities that seemingly “exist” before this, but this may well be a retroactive illusion – the paradox is that actually they wouldn’t exist at all without the addition of a mere rumor, they need this godly rumor to be sustained, they are not independent of their clustering by the rumor. There is a rumor going around about the God particle (physicists strongly dislike this term), but it turns out that this particle itself functions as a mere rumor. – What I have in mind is a very different kind of ontological status for rumors, although this distant analogy may prove to be strangely fitting.
Philosophy famously started with a divide, by drawing a sharp opposition between what in Greek times was called doxa and what was called epistēmē. Doxa is the regime of opinions (or beliefs). Everybody is entitled to an opinion, and there is no compelling necessity that opinions be firmly grounded: they depend on private views, tastes, and preferences, but most often take their support from being widely spread and repeated. They are based on one’s personal stance – I think so, I feel so, I experience it this way, I believe so – and they are ultimately tautological – I think so because I think so, and my personal opinion is my right and my freedom, indeed the much celebrated freedom of opinion. Or, concomitantly, it is so because everybody says that it is so: opinions amount to generally accepted common views but, despite their wide spread, still lack a firm foundation. They draw their authority just from being repeated. By contrast, epistēmē is knowledge that has to be epistemologically founded and substantiated: founded not on personal preferences, tautologies, or common assent but on “the thing itself.” Knowledge aims at truth, this is the ambition that defines it, and truth should be binding and universal, not a matter of mere opinion. Knowledge has to be legitimized, it has to be based on sound argument, factual evidence, and impartial objectivity, and all this has to be ultimately grounded in logos. Let’s say that logos is the big “Other” that should vouchsafe legitimate proper knowledge. Let’s say that logos is the classical Greek name for what Lacan, 2,500 years later, would call the big Other – in the sense of a guarantee of knowledge in its universality, in its validity, and in its binding character. Logos is the authority we all have to assume when aiming at knowledge and truth. The stark opposition between doxa and epistēmē, between opinion and knowledge, goes back to the Socratic foundations of philosophy, and Socrates famously spent his time dismantling people’s opinions, destroying them, showing their ungrounded, arbitrary nature. All it took was asking a few awkward questions, and the regime of doxa would crumble. That was his favorite occupation.
Now rumors stand even lower in rank by comparison with opinions. One thing that can be said in favor of opinions is that at least people subscribe to them, they treat them as cherished possessions, they even take pride in them, they regard them as their expression, and the freedom of expression is reputedly inalienable – whereas what defines rumors is that nobody quite subscribes to them. “I heard that …,” “people say that …,” “it has been suggested that …,” “rumor has it that …” We should perhaps pause for a moment to mark in particular the curious structure of this common wording, “rumor has IT,” which oddly suggests that rumors may indeed have to do with the Freudian It – should one suggest “rumor has id”? – and, inversely, that “It” may be subject to rumors.2
From breeze to storm
Rumors have in principle no author, they just circulate anonymously, as if by themselves, impersonally; one hears them and passes them on. There is something puzzling and ominous about this quasi-impersonal circulation: they go around like a breeze of air, stemming as if from nowhere and enveloping us, then passing on; but on the way, as it moves along, the breeze easily turns into a tempest, a whirlwind, an indomitable force, causing havoc. This metaphor actually became a running cliché about rumors, being repeated endlessly throughout history. Fama crescit eundo, as the Latin proverb has it: rumor grows as it goes, it increases while circulating.
But the proverb is a shorthand of its flamboyant origin in Virgil’s Aeneid:
Rumour,3 compared with whom no other is as swift.
She flourishes by speed, and gains strength as she goes:
first limited by fear, she soon reaches into the sky,
walks on the ground, and hides her head in the clouds.
[…]
She flies, screeching, by night through the shadows
between earth and sky, never closing her eyelids
in sweet sleep: by day she sits on guard on tall roof-tops
or high towers, and scares great cities, as tenacious
of lies and evil, as she is messenger of truth.4
Virgil gives a vivid, spectacular description of what may seem a rather slight and trivial phenomenon. The passage reads like a mighty crescendo, as rumor starts timidly and then rapidly reaches virtually cosmic proportions, an unstoppable and overwhelming omnipresence. The tiny creature turns into a giant, lurking from everywhere, never at rest, although it’s a mere rumor. Curiously, the context of this passage in the Aeneid is such that it is by rumor that Jupiter, the king of gods, eventually hears about the passionate affair between Aeneas and Dido, the queen of Carthage, and upon learning about it is spurned into immediate action to prevent it. So rumors reach even the gods; the gods are not above rumors and they need rumors to keep themselves informed. This particular rumor happens to be true, and the end of the passage implies that rumors unabashedly mix lies and truths – rumors can indeed be true, but this is the trouble, the whirlwind they cause undermines the very basis of distinction between true and false.
The expansion of rumors seems to present like an ontological puzzle, a case of creatio almost ex nihilo: a tiny speck grows into a magnificent creature by mere movement. There is no assignable origin to a rumor, one just hears it and passes it on, as a relay, yet it augments by being passed on, as if it were a natural objective force, obfuscating “our” part in its expansion. Of course, there are rumors that are intentionally invented and systematically spread, but they can function as rumors only as long as they seemingly have no ascertained source. But if rumors have no author, it doesn’t follow that they have no authority; quite the opposite. By being impersonal and anonymous, with no origin, they carry all the more an unfathomable, inscrutable, intractable authority. There is like a mysterious conversion, a transubstantiation that takes place with rumors: there is no proof, no origin, no author, no guarantee, but nevertheless they are quasi-mystically transformed into a formidable force that it is very hard, virtually impossible, to combat. Being without foundation, they nevertheless produce formidable effects; their efficiency stands in stark contrast to their lack of ground or support. “Everybody knows” that this is a mere rumor, based on thin air, but one cannot help lending it an ear and allowing it to work. Octave Mannoni, in a famous paper from 1964, proposed the notorious formula Je sais bien, mais quand même, “I know very well, but nevertheless,”5 and rumors present a vintage case of this formula: “I know very well this is a mere rumor, but nevertheless … there may be something to it, or at least it’s intriguing and entertaining, or some people may get into trouble by it, so let me participate in this for a bit, although I know very well that there is ultimately nothing to it – or is it?” And since nobody subscribes to them (“I am not endorsing this myself, this is just a rumor I heard,” hence I am exempt from responsibility; “I am saying this and I am not saying this”), they also fit another formula, elaborated by Robert Pfaller: beliefs without owners.6 There are beliefs circulating around that nobody quite takes in (one generally imputes them to others, to the dupes), but they nevertheless produce effects. In Pfaller’s reading, such beliefs are ultimately constitutive of social bonds and of culture at large.
It looks as if rumors present another face of the big Other: not the face of logos, knowledge, and truth but something that nobody quite believes to be true, yet it unfailingly works and is given a questionable credence and general currency. It’s a matter of effectiveness and expediency rather than (or as opposed to) truth. Rumors, too, can turn out to be true, but what defines them as rumors is their indifference to the true–false criterion. There is a kind of paradoxical reversal with this kind of big Other: the more it appears fickle, unfounded, untrustworthy, unsubstantiated, the more it presents the big Other in its pure form. It is overpowering precisely because of its lack of foundation, not despite of it. It is given a space to rule against everyone’s better knowledge. It is as if we have to do here with two opposing faces of the big Other, with no common measure: on the one hand, the big Other that can (and should) provide the epistemological foundation of proper knowledge, based on logos
