{"id":6446,"date":"2010-10-19T13:24:57","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T17:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=6446"},"modified":"2010-10-19T15:40:16","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T19:40:16","slug":"laura-kipnis-and-a-theory-of-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/10\/19\/laura-kipnis-and-a-theory-of-scandal\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Kipnis and a Theory of Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Laura Kipnis is not a scandalous person. The Northwestern Professor of media studies has written five books, received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and is a contributor to<\/em> Harper\u2019s,<\/em> Slate,<\/em> and The New York Times. In her latest book, <\/em>How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior<\/a>, she develops a \u201ctheory of scandal.\u201d The book does not include the latest tabloid gossip; rather, Kipnis takes an academic approach in understanding the psychology behind stories of people like Linda Tripp and James Frey. I recently interviewed Kipnis in her New York apartment (where I was happy to see a set of<\/em> The Paris Review interview series<\/a> on her shelves).<\/em><\/p>\n

There doesn\u2019t seem to be a lot of writing on the \u201ctheory of scandal.\u201d What kind of research did you do for this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a currently little-read psychoanalyst named Theodor Reik, a student of Freud\u2019s, who wrote on what he called social masochism, which involves people using society as an instrument of self-punishment, acting things out in public in a way that guarantees some kind of social retribution. I found this incredibly fascinating and useful, since the big question of the book ends up being about self-destruction, about people organizing their own downfalls. Reik isn\u2019t very in fashion anymore, I don\u2019t know why. He\u2019s also written a lot of very counterintuitive stuff on guilt and revenge, which I draw on in a number of the chapters. Ren\u00e9 Girard\u2019s book on scapegoats was also helpful in thinking about the social dynamics of scandal. What I didn\u2019t find was much on scandal itself that was particularly useful, but that\u2019s also exciting as a writer: You get to invent the terrain.
\n<\/p>\n

Were you ever involved in a scandal?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I admit that I\u2019m weirdly drawn to bad behavior, at least I seem to have written about it repeatedly, between porn, adultery, and now scandal. So yes, I\u2019ve been thinking about exactly this question: How close have I myself come? Or might potentially come? One of the closest scrapes I can think of\u2014or that I\u2019m willing to describe publicly\u2014was being about to publish something once that did have something of a vindictive element, and then being stopped by an editor who said, \u201cDon\u2019t publish that.\u201d It\u2019s hard to predict how scandalous it would have been; it involved revealing things that might have been potentially humiliating. Of course, it might have gone unnoticed. But it\u2019s made me think about the function of editors for writers\u2014they\u2019re like auxiliary super-egos, at least a decent editor is. This can be a mixed blessing, of course.<\/p>\n

\"\"People tend to label you as a writer targeting women\u2019s issues, and even the cover of How to Become a Scandal<\/em> has a feminine pink title. But your writing doesn\u2019t come off as gender-specific. Why do people want to classify you this way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I do find the gender categorizing frustrating, for all the usual reasons. I once wrote a book\u2014Against Love<\/em>\u2014that has absolutely no gendered pronouns in it, no he<\/em> or she<\/em>, and doesn\u2019t talk about gender at all, and I still hear people, on occasion, referring to it as a feminist book. I wrote another book that was explicitly about women\u2014The Female Thing<\/em>\u2014that I think got taken less intellectually seriously than anything I\u2019ve written, even though it was probably the most intellectually serious thing I\u2019ve written. One of the things that could be a strike against me is that I tend to write about low cultural subjects\u2014femininity being one of these, scandal another, and of course an earlier book on pornography. I suspect that \u201clow\u201d gets confused with intellectually unserious, and then being a woman on top of it doesn\u2019t exactly help. Though I should add that whenever my work has been trivialized and dismissed by reviewers, it\u2019s always been by other women. The vast levels of competitiveness among women\u2014well let\u2019s just say it isn\u2019t pretty.<\/p>\n

Do you think the digital culture is contributing to the growth of scandal?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One question I get asked a lot, and don\u2019t have a great answer for, is: What about these people who are using scandal to get themselves into the limelight and promote their careers? The Paris Hiltons and Kardashians \u2026 Who seem to have propelled themselves into something of an elevated cultural position by being scandalous. But they\u2019re not really all that scandalous, are they? Releasing soft porn videos isn\u2019t actually violating a major social taboo.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that people want to project themselves into the public eye like that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I do think our society is becoming increasingly narcissistic, and a contributing factor is the fact that everyone has such instant access to the media. There used to be the clich\u00e9 about fifteen minutes of fame. Now it\u2019s about living your entire life in public. For certain personality types apparently, this is utterly gratifying\u2014or, more likely, we\u2019re being transformed into the personality types that find it gratifying. Of course, what gets forgotten is that the limelight isn\u2019t always so forgiving. The public sphere can turn on you and be incredibly sadistic. Linda Tripp, the subject of chapter 3 (\u201cThe Whistleblower\u201d) is an example: someone who propelled herself into the middle of a major scandal\u2014or instigated a major scandal, in fact\u2014creating a massive feeding frenzy with herself as the raw meat. She didn\u2019t come out of it exactly unscathed.<\/p>\n

So, you see publicity as potentially harmful rather than beneficial? How does that work out for a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s such a shift in the public-private divide, it\u2019s so up for grabs at the moment, and I don\u2019t think anyone quite knows what to make of it or where things will end up. As a writer, especially someone who writes on subjects like love or scandal, you sometimes end up feeling like no question about your personal life is off limits\u2014people seem surprised if you don\u2019t want to talk about your personal life publicly. Obviously, memoir is such an ascendant form, the premise ends up being that what writers do for a living is reveal intensely private things about themselves in print. It\u2019s not that my work isn\u2019t personal, but what\u2019s personal about it maybe isn\u2019t sitting on the surface in quite such a transparent way. Sometimes I think I\u2019m just an anomalously private person living in the age of diminishing privacy.<\/p>\n

What would be your ideal scandal if you had to be involved in one?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I did feel a certain connection to the first two scandals in the book, I confess, both of which have to do with love and injury. Basically, they\u2019re cases of people not getting over blows to their egos and then taking some kind of crazed action to rectify the situation. That\u2019s certainly the backstory of the Lisa Nowak case, the astronaut who drove across the country to confront her old boyfriend\u2019s new girlfriend \u2026 It\u2019s not so hard to understand the imperative to cushion the blow by leaping into action, though maybe not the precise specifics. The pepper spray probably wasn\u2019t a great idea, and it\u2019s not very clear what she thought she\u2019d accomplish. But the idea that you could do something dramatic that would change someone\u2019s mind, that would set things right, would win back the beloved\u2014I don\u2019t find it so difficult to understand the impulse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Kipnis is not a scandalous person. The Northwestern Professor of media studies has written five books, received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and is a contributor to Harper\u2019s, Slate, and The New York Times. In her latest book, How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, she develops a \u201ctheory of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1106,1107,1097,1108,1109,1100],"class_list":["post-6446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-how-to-become-a-scandal","tag-james-frey","tag-laura-kipnis","tag-linda-trip","tag-lisa-nowak","tag-paris-hilton"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLaura Kipnis and a Theory of Scandal by Natalie Jacoby<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 19, 2010 \u2013 Laura Kipnis is not a scandalous person. 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