After class today I read this article. In case you don’t make it through the six pages, it’s about Lisa Taddeo, a female writer, who goes under cover on the website Ashley Madison.
Ashley Madison is a social networking site for people who are involved with a partner but wish to have an affair. It’s not a secret; their slogan is “Life is Short. Have an Affair.” Initially, when I heard about it, I though, whatever, there are lots of seedy internet websites, not a surprise. However, this site is a little bit more than that. To begin with, it is successful. So far they have tried to endorse four sports stadiums, three arenas, and one airport, (Sky Harbor thankfully chose dignity and debt). However, creepiest fun fact to note is their membership base. They have 8 million and are growing.
What does this have to do with Lit? Crit.?
Well. Let me tell you.
In the article, Lisa Taddeo notes how the men she met weren’t (solely) after sex, they were after meaning. Meaning through long soul exposing emails. Meaning through the demonization of “her” aka their wives and fiancés. Meaning through someone new. All of this relied entirely on their rhetoric.
And even more so, their conversations relied on the changeability of language, like Bakhtin discusses. Just as Caitlin went through the meaning of he word twilight, Taddeo examines the use of romantic rhetoric. Bakhtin says “every extra-artistic prose discourse- in any of its forms quotidian, rhetorical, scholarly- cannot fail to be oriented toward the ‘already uttered’” (1090).
In relation to Ashley Madison, this meant that it didn’t matter that the wife was reduced to a pronoun, for Taddeo, any utterance of affection is viewed through the lens of a broken wedding vow. The emotional affair, even though not physically consummated, destroyed the value of the men’s words just as our knowledge of the existence of Stephanie Meyer’s stories have destroyed any innocent rendering of the word twilight.
Read the article. What do you think? Are Bakhtin’s ideas about linguistic progressions comparable with extramarital affairs?
Absolutely, yes, I think. I think the word "romance" and the ideas it has accumulated over time and through cultures has probably contributed to the problem, in fact. Part of what's missing for all these men is an understanding of their relationships and what they want, which results from an inability to understand the real meaning behind the words they use to define what they want.
ReplyDeleteSarah,
ReplyDeleteI really like your post, and the ideas you've got going on. I think Bakhtin is quite applicable here, particularly when it comes to the significance of context and words. Like Caitlin was saying, the words themselves have acquired different meanings which causes confusion. It goes back to Paul Auster's novel: we still call an umbrella an umbrella even when it is broken and no longer serves any purpose as an umbrella. Likewise, we still call love "love" even when it's been so convoluted by cultural conceptions it really is lust or boredom or other such things. It is very difficult to understand the meaning behind such words because the ideas have become so hard to grasp and so wide ranging. And like Sarah is saying, the context is huge. Hearing "I love you" from a married man is incredibly different from hearing it from your faithful and devoted fiance.
In many ways, we understand the whole of language through context, both the word within the context of a sentence to the sentence within a context of the person speaking it to the person speaking it within the context of the cultural they've come out of. For example, I'll steal the word "cheating" from Sarah's title(the following is sadly a true example, by the way). By itself, "cheating" implies someone playing a game unfairly, someone peeking at the exam of the student next to them during a text, Tiger Woods, and so forth and so on. Then if the sentence is "it's not cheating if my spouse is okay with it," we can pick out that this cheating is more likely in reference to a sexual relationship. Pull the scope out further to the person speaking, who is, let's say, a 40 something year-old man whose wife is letting him cheat on her in hopes of saving the marriage. Now cheating reflects both the husband's selfishness and the wife's desperateness. Then pull the scope out even further to cultural context of the good old USA, and this kind of behavior is okay and socially acceptable in some ways (if it wasn't, Ashely Madison wouldn't even exist. People obviously don't think cheating is all that bad or they wouldn't be 8 million of them happily signing up to do it) or at the very least tolerated. In some other cultures, this would be an no-go and shocking, but here, it's fairly common and not anything that would cause anyone to have a stoke. So with all those different contextual layers piling up on each word we use, it's a wonder we can understand anything and even communicate at all.
Absolutely ditto to what Aubrey and Caitlin said. Even without this particular example, the word "love" still has a ridiculous number of different meanings, depending on the context. "I love sunshine," "I love my family," "I love that you know that," and "I love my husband" all use the word love, but none of the meanings are the same.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of a couple lines from one of my favorite Jack Gilbert poems: "How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite." (Actually, the entire poem, called "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart," is an excellent example of what we've been talking about.) We rely so much on language to communicate our true intent, but it's all arbitrary and subject to interpretation.
Aubrey-- I'm not sure that people don't think cheating is bad. Notice how few of them use that word. Rather, they use words to trick themselves into believing they aren't doing something which they are. Many of them do think it's bad in some sense or another, they just redefine what they are doing so that it's not cheating-- which is pretty closely related to Bakhtin's theory. We do the same with murder. Is war murder? Not if we define the enemy correctly. Is abortion murder? Not if we define the child correctly. Is genocide murder? Not if we define the Jews correctly. Bakhtin's theory can become scary when we recognize how easily words control things, and how evolving definition can change our entire worldview.
ReplyDeleteWe are in a world where I can't look over the dusky sunset and express how greatly I love the mystery of twilight without evoking images of Byronic vampires and cardboard heroines. And that's one of the less scary implications.
Aubrey,
ReplyDeleteI think your post is appropriate and has a lot to do w/ Bakhtin. To what extent is what Taddeo is proposing/doing carnivalesque? Does it really invert common practice/belief in society?