Gossip

Honoré Victorin Daumier, Three Gossips (1865/1867)

This is an excerpt from Mladen Dolar’s book Rumors, published by Polity Press.

I have used “rumors” as a generic term, taking it as roughly synonymous with gossip, hearsay, slander, calumny, tittle-tattle, and the like. All these entities have largely been an object of moral condemnation and critique in the entire tradition, but each of them has a slightly different shading, background, and field of reference. Some of them are obviously and strongly negative (denigration, backbiting, slander, calumny, etc.); rumors and gossip are nevertheless more neutral. They often function as quasi-synonyms, but we have come to a point where we have to make a rough distinction between the two. The source of rumors cannot be ascertained; they circulate anonymously; one merely hears them and passes them on without subscribing to them, although this neutrality is very questionable and is largely propelled by schadenfreude, a malicious detachment, and an evasion of responsibility for what may well have very damaging effects. With gossip, on the other hand, the source is most often known. Gossip takes place in a circle of friends and acquaintances and concerns people one knows.1 It is distinguished by a particular mode, marked not so much by imparting verifiable information as by speculation and the formation and exchange of attitudes and judgments, points of view, evaluations, and internal secrets that “others” are not privy to. It tests ideas that don’t have to abide by the public standards of evidence and proof, but rather pertain to the informal and private ties of friendship and intimacy.2 Gossip can thus function as basic social networking, establishing and maintaining social bonds that perhaps couldn’t be set up at all without this essential constituent. Gossip is necessary to ascertain and sustain one’s belonging to a community and one’s standing in it, to uphold the place one occupies in the social world and the reputation one enjoys.

I said earlier that rumors don’t figure on Jakobson’s list of the basic functions of language, but there may be some room for gossip as an elementary part of what he described as phatic communication—the kind that conveys no substantial information but only keeps the communicational channel alive, retaining the capacity to open it, verify it along the way, and close it if necessary. This is the function par excellence of greetings (“Hello!”) and ritualistic or empty formulae with no proper content (“How are you?”). In the case of gossip, this function instigates and maintains inclusion in a group, but at the price of the concomitant exclusion of some, given that gossip by definition happens behind the back of the absent others, the objects of gossip. Shall we say bad rumors versus good gossip? Maybe not quite.

The idea that gossip is the basic function of language has its proponents among serious anthropologists and psychologists. The most famous in this respect is Robin Dunbar, author of a book with a telling title: Grooming, Gossip, and the Origin of Language. Grooming, in monkey societies, is a hands-on activity of taking care of one another’s fur and serves as a powerful agent in establishing social bonds and hierarchies. A lot of time, care, and energy is devoted to it. It is an elementary form of social networking—who grooms whom, who can expect benefits from grooming a higher-ranking individual, who bonds with whom: there is here a complicated combination of mutuality and hierarchy, and even a long-term strategic social calculation. Seen in this light, language—this is the author’s dazzling suggestion—could ultimately look like “grooming at a distance”:

Could it be that language evolved as a kind of vocal grooming to allow us to bond larger groups than was possible using the conventional primate mechanism of physical grooming? … Language thus seems ideally suited in various ways to being a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming … In a nutshell, I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.3

This, then, would be the crucial step inaugurating humanity: the move from physical contact to a vocal tie through language. And the zero function of language would then be that of gossip. From monkey society to society columns and TikTok there is but a slide, once this step has been accomplished. The use of gossip as a basic property of language can be empirically researched. The scrutiny of innumerable recorded conversations came to the following result:

About two-thirds of conversation time is devoted to social topics. These include discussions of personal relationships, personal likes and dislikes, personal experiences, the behavior of other people and similar topics … One of the most important things gossip allows you to do is to keep track of (and of course influence) other people’s reputations as well as your own. Gossip … is all about the management of reputation.4

Most of the time, then, we use language as a vehicle for gossip, and the name of the game is social networking, establishing in-groups and out-groups, and particularly doing reputation management, an apposite concept.5 This gossip function can be traced back to incipient uses of language in the formation of elementary social bonds, then pursued up to its flamboyant, cancer-like expansion in contemporary social media; but is the latter merely an amplification of the same mechanism? We’ll come back to this.

If we follow this line of thought, we have to conceive of gossip as a positive entity: good gossip serving a very basic social purpose and offering benefit. If rumors, gossip, slander, and so on generally appear as pathological, morally reprehensible, or at least trifling and trivial, can one conceive of something like an “authentic” gossip? Serious gossip, essential gossip? This is a line of argument amply illustrated in the delightful book on gossip by Patricia Meyer Spacks.6 Her approach is that gossip, which is neither good nor bad in itself, should be considered in its particular functions and placed somewhere in between the two extremes of bad gossip and good gossip. At one end there is calumny, denigration, defamation, and character assassination, each driven by malice, envy, exclusion, or weaponization and often having harsh social and political consequences; in our times, this is what most often fuels something like cancel culture, for example. At the other end there is “serious” gossip, which caters to privacy, intimacy, solidarity, and shared pleasure, having the capacity to create and intensify human connections, to speak the language of shared experience, to foster intelligence, and to serve as the catalyst of social processes; this is a basic form of socialization, which produces the very fabric of the social. The point is not so much to redeem gossip from its bad reputation as to display and scrutinize its dual or rather multiple nature, its utter ambiguity, its complexity against the almost univocal moral reprehension and condemnation that accompanied it throughout various traditions and to point out that its social function is absolutely necessary for human bonding. At the same time, the ambiguity of gossip stems from its own presupposition, namely that one always gossips about the absent. The ties among an in-group, which are promoted through gossip, always implicitly depend on the exclusion of an out-group, and an amicable bond has the nasty tendency of indulging in the power that one can exert over the absent others. It’s ultimately a matter of us versus them, with shifting boundaries between the two—between who is in and who is out. The necessary social activity of gossip, fostering solidarity, is never quite free from the inextricable other side and can easily slide into the nasty logic of rumors.

Meyer Spacks’s argument is not exactly new; there have been, in the same tradition, quite a few voices to stand up for gossip—from a pamphlet defending gossip in 1821 to (most remarkably) W. H. Auden in 19387—but they were a small minority against the prevailing tone of condemnation. I have singled out Meyer Spacks as a particularly lucid, articulate, and perceptive voice; she presents a lot of background and proposes an astute reading of a number of English and American novels by way of building a case.8 After all, literature, and of course novels in the first place, were written by authors who knew all along the complexity and ambivalence of gossip and explored at length its multiple and contradictory functions; it’s just that one has to listen carefully to their implications. Meyer Spacks’s book, published in 1985, marks perhaps a turning point, although it had some predecessors; at any rate it stands out in the literature on gossip. Most of the recent literature on the topic follows Spacks’s general approach of analyzing complexity rather than dispensing moral judgments.9

One major function of gossip that has to be particularly valued is its capacity to form an alternative culture and an alternative community in the face of the ruling ideology. It can serve as a resource for the underdog, for the oppressed and the dispossessed. First of all, there is a “spontaneous” propensity to ascribe gossip and rumors to women (we see it already in the personification of fama in ancient Rome: Fama was a goddess). Women are supposed to be especially dexterous in this area. If logos is male, does it follow that the other side of the big Other has a feminine face? The totality of logos versus the “not all” of feminine gossip? Man’s proper use of language versus woman’s alleged misuse, idle talk, perversion of logos?10 The “natural” assumption that women sexualize the logos with rumors and gossip is, of course, profoundly symptomatic of the nature and presuppositions of logos itself, of its tacit masculinist prejudice in its very universality. Still, this highly biased ascription nevertheless points to the function of gossip in forming a female alliance and finding resources to counteract male dominance. Women were historically excluded from the public sphere, so gossip served as a resource and form of empowerment. This was enough to instill in men a fear of women’s bonding through gossip, which escapes control and can then serve as a screen for male fantasies—who knows what women talk about among themselves, what dangers may lurk in their tittle-tattle, what secret, inaccessible jouissance they share, what remains out of men’s reach. Hence the attitude of stark condemnation and dismissal, persistently repeated throughout ages and cultures, and the entrenched belief that gossip is empty, worthless, frivolous, of no consequence, and yet dangerous and threatening. Since gossip is about reputation management, the fear is that women’s gossip may seriously put in jeopardy male reputation and supremacy. Gossip and rumors have indeed the power to turn the tables, so this fear is not just imaginary.

There is no doubt a democratic potential to gossip as a source of social bonding and empowerment for all groups that have limited or no access to the public sphere. In colonial contexts, the colonizers generally didn’t speak the language of the colonized, so the latter could trade confidential information and maintain community cohesion in the face of oppression through the network of gossip.11 This largely goes for all disempowered minorities: they have to rely on gossip as a vital resource. And it goes especially for Black and queer communities, which have both found in rumors and gossip a formidable means of creating alternative cultures and tools of resistance (I cannot expand on this topic here, but I can refer to some excellent literature).12 Finally, as I know from personal experience, in socialist countries, where access to information was limited and the official sources were not to be trusted, for vital information one had to rely heavily, day by day, on rumors and gossip; and since rumors and gossip are not reliable either, the whole population developed intricate hermeneutical skills to sieve both official and unofficial sources. Rumors and gossip were essential for survival and solidarity.

This brings us finally to a larger point, namely the utter ambiguity of the constellation that we started from: the problem of the big Other and its shadow, a problem epitomized by the initial opposition between logos and rumors. There is the public and shiny side of the big Other, which aims at universality and offers a guarantee, while the shadowy flip side of rumors presents a figure of another big Other, one that possesses an unfounded yet unfathomable authority and threatens to undermine the former. Now we have seen that the shadowy flip side itself splits at least into two, as it were. In relation to logos, both rumors and gossip represent the nonuniversal, the speech that cannot be universalized and is not properly grounded, yet has different valences, oscillating between the pernicious and the beneficial: at one end it threatens to undercut the authority that underpins the symbolic order, at the other end it points to the questionable nature of this very authority and displays its bias, its complicity with power, and the exclusion that its universality presupposes. In this sense, not only are rumors and gossip characterized by a lack of foundation in relation to the big Other, whose authority looks properly founded, but they also point at the shaky foundation of that authority itself. The big Other and its symptom, we said; and the symptom is profoundly revelatory of the inner impasse of the authority of the Other itself. This doesn’t mean at all that we should give up on it, debunk it as an illusion, or simply denounce its oppressive nature; rather this calls for a constant engagement with its paradoxical nature. Rumors and gossip feature like an unvouched-for supplement of the big Other, its necessarily produced symptom, its stain, its question mark. Within this sphere, one can draw an opposition between the viciousness of rumors and the advantages of gossip—and here rumors are construed as power over the powerless, gossip as the resource of power of the powerless, but the dividing line is shifting and has to be drawn always anew. It’s more like they are both placed on a Moebius strip, the beneficial sliding easily into the detrimental. We find ourselves in the same predicament: there is no big Other without its double, but ultimately there is no Other of the Other.