Reading through Richard Terdiman’s account of the relationship of dominant- and counter-discourses in 19th-century France, I’m struck by the ways in which his description of the transformation of satire in that period replicates the dynamics of Michel Serres’ “parasitic logic”. So this post develops the parasite/media theme through a brief application of Serres’ parasitology to Terdiman’s account of satire under the July Monarchy, (which may sound a bit recondite, but according to Terdiman it is one of the seminal events in “media history”, honest!).
First some Serres
In The Parasite, our favourite interdisciplinarian effectively takes the chaos theorist’s maxim that noise (parasite in French) is a more complex form of information, and applies it to Fontaine’s fable ‘The City Rat and the Country Rat’.
Fontaine’s fable, says Serres, is structured around parasitic relations - that is, relations based on taking without giving. Firstly the country rat eats at the table of the town rat, but fails in his sacred duty as guest to pay for his supper with a tale. Instead, scared by the noise at the door, he eats and runs. Tsk tsk.
Obviously the whole fable turns on the rat’s status as parasite within human society: his ‘feast’ is in reality the crumbs left by the householder. However, in Fontaine’s story the householder is a tax farmer and, as such, is himself living off the leftovers (surplus) of the farmer, the fable’s ‘true’ producer – just as, at a different scale, the city is a ‘parasite’ on the country.
Or so it seems, but according to Serres the farmer is also a parasite, living at the expense of his livestock: taking from nature but giving nothing back “except death”.
In Serres’ reading, consequently, “abuse value precedes use value”: everybody lives off somebody else. Or to put it another way, in every simple system of exchange, there occurs some noise, some interference, and when we shift our perspective and treat that noise as information, we see that the simple system forms part of a more complex ‘parasitic logic’.
Theorem: noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain. The parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again. The city rat gets used to it, is vaccinated, becomes immune. The town makes noise, but the noise makes the town. (Serres, 2007: 14)
So how does this play out in Terdiman’s account of discourse and counter-discourse in nineteenth-century France?
We begin with Louise-Philippe, a Liberal monarch promoting himself as the “citizen king” the champion of free speech. A proto-typical version of the ideal democracy in which subject and ruler are one and the same: perfect communication.
Here the noise/parasite takes the form of the satirical journal, Le Charivari founded in 1832 by Charles Philipon, and featuring the lithographs of Honoré Daumier. In exemplary parasitic fashion Le Charivari exploits to the full the host’s professed commitment to free speech, pillorying the corruption of the regime in true Rabelaisian style:
Louis-Philippe’s response to the satirist’s alternative take on the bourgeois feedback system is initially direct and legalistic: arrests, seizures of property, imprisonment.Which of course simply intensifies resistance – Philipon and Daumier meet each other in prison.
According to the logic of the parasite, however, the interruption of noise should stimulate the host to adapt and change – noise should produce a more complex communicative system which incorporates the parasite/noise as new information.
In other words, the story calls for a bang.
Cue Giuseppe Marco Fieschi and his infernal machine, a twenty-barrelled machine gun with which he attempts to assassinate L-P. He misses his target but kills 14 bystanders. In an early example of the shock doctrine, Fieschi’s infernal machine provides the government with the perfect excuse to transform the nature of the channel. Henceforth the discourse governing communication between government and populace will no longer be determined by the principle of free speech, but by the dictates of law and order.
Specifically, a press act is introduced which criminalizes satirical attacks on the king, his government or their actions. It also prohibits the publication of any image which hasn’t been given prior approval by the government. Fieschi’s noise effectively institutionalizes censorship.
Censorship as noise
For the publisher of a satirical daily, state censorship constitutes some fairly serious noise on the line and, in Terdiman’s account, instigates a major adaptive manoeuvre on the part of Le Charivari:
with no possibility of criticizing the king or his government, Philipon shifted the focus of the paper’s mockery to those of whom king and government in any case had always been the synecdochic representatives. (Terdiman 163)
From political satire Le Chariviri changes up to ideological satire: it targets bourgeois society as a whole, and does so through another classic parasitic manoeuvre, by co-opting the existing visual language of the physiognomy, or portrayal of recognisable ‘types’ through which the bourgeois had traditionally signified its difference from, and superiority to the non-bourgeois.
In Terdiman’s account this detournement of an existing language provoked by the interruption of censorship effectively transforms the language of satire and marks the triumph of counter-discourse over dominant discourse. The aim of a counter-discourse, says Terdiman, is to wrest control of the symbolic from the dominant discourse, and this is achieved by Daumier’s “corrosive” deployment of the language of description far more effectively than the use of exaggeration and deformation in political satire.
Censorship as filter
As such, this latest interruption once again transforms the system. Instead of noise on the line, censorship acts as a filter which eliminates the noise of a fairly messy/medieval/Rabelaisian satirical language characterized by carnivalesque exaggeration and deformation. It brings about its replacement by a language which subverts the bourgeoisie’s own self-expression: for the bourgeois it is no longer possible to speak and act as a bourgeois without the consciousness of the satirist at his shoulder. (There is a great Daumier litho of a landscape artist at his easel with a cartoonist at his easel behind him, unfortunately not on-line.)
If the aim of counter-discourse is to wrest control of the symbolic from the dominant discourse and thereby make us see the world differently, Daumier achieves perfect satire. He no longer has to exaggerate the feature of the bourgeois world in order to make it appear ridiculous, it is enough to simply repeat its banalities.
Media as noise
But of course such perfection demands to be interrupted. This time it is the media itself which insists on being heard:
. . . as anyone who has examined an original Daumier lithograph . . . has noticed, the surface of the plate is itself disrupted by the print-through of the page 4 advertisements, which under the conditions of nineteenth-century letterpress technology was extremely difficult to prevent. A phantom, palimpsest presence of the medium’s commercial side thus floats on the surface of its satire. (Terdiman 190)
The interference of the commercial underside of the media with its satiric content points to another shift within the relationship between dominant- and counter-discourse. Not only are Daumier’s satires of bourgeois life disseminated by the media from which the bourgeois derives its wealth, his readership has also become bourgeois. Whereas the original public consisted of republicans and conservative critics of the “bourgeois monarchy” (Left and Right), the readership now comprises the bourgeoisie itself. A change recognised by Daumier when he has Macaire (the figure through whom he satirizes the rapacity of the bourgeois) pay a visit to his studio to complement the cartoonist on his work. In another lithograph reproduced by Terdiman, he shows two bourgeois readers of Le Charivari with their faces hidden by the paper in which they will discover their own images. As Terdiman says,
The Chinese-puzzle exchange of efforts to undo or outflank the discourse of the Other is thus particularly complex in this representation. But the configuration of this ‘mise-en-abyme’ is really that of the termless struggle to re-envelop the opponent which constitutes all discursive combat. Indeed, the play of opposing efforts to achieve symbolic domination resembles nothing more than the childhood fantasy (or the topological enigma) of two predators each of which is intent upon devouring the other, absorbing the substance of its rival into itself (Terdiman, 179)
In this and other images, Daumier effectively depicts the topological relationship between satire and its media, suggesting that satire as a counter-discourse is always in the position of parasite and host. Satire lives off its object, feeds off its energy. Interrupting Terdiman with Serres, I hope makes the topological relationship between discourse and counter-discourse clearer and helps us rethink the space of satire as a mode which operates not through the mechanics of resistance and opposition but through the constant transformations of noise.
