Theater of Gossip

Nadhir Muhammad Habibi
Writers’ Blokke
Published in
3 min readOct 31, 2021
Grandmother laughs while talking to her friend on the terrace of the house. Photo taken by Dendik Setiawan.

The moral code is chewing gum for gossip. In religious ethics, it must be uprooted, and sometimes even must be fought. It’s always the embodiment of Satan’s temptations. Whispering ghosts for a weak believer.

The aristocratic revolution put an end to gossip only on the surface. In the bourgeois era, gossip is reproduced in the mass media with valor, deceit, and respectability. The difference between normal and abnormal evaporates by opening the veil as wide as possible, the disappearance of the private dimension. The destruction of this temperament marks the center of gravity is replaced by a libidinal economy. Some of the things that gossip shows are not the delivery of messages and meanings, but the surge of desire, sexual excitement, consumer passion, masking passion, power surge.

Gossip operates through a series of diffraction, through the emptying of signs from messages and their meanings. Everything that can be revealed lies beyond this illusion. What happens at the level of anagrams of gossip, does not require the sovereignty of reality as a light. But the structure is ironic and tragic; practices that break the referential primary network. Taking that representative residue, it expands towards the cosmetic subject and the mirror object, in the guise of its image. Tendentious. Foaming mouth, all of which is channeled into the order of persuasive communication. Become thin two fundamental forms between real and virtual, presence and absence, male and female to go to the border of death.

The whole conception of “plastic” in gossip may be constructed around positive functions coordinated with negative forms. In turn, each persuasion positions itself. Dialogue about the incident, trying to find the tentative truth and make it see-through. Obsessed with this, gossip organizes conversation, mobilizes a circle of participants. Each circulation of words forms a postulate that must be reinvestigated. Therefore, the oral pleasure of gossiping is in line with the spirit of hearing, detailed scanning, and as a place for defloration of pseudo things.

As if the glitter of gossip is superior to the satisfaction of the psychology of persuasion. The spectral phenomena in it are not merely refractive, imagery, or a form of decorative screen complete with supporting visual plots, but display a myth, something that still represents fact, historical, compulsive fantasy. The claim that gossip creates a “theatrical stage” is never filled with the cradle of actual performers. Playing the role of the masses, they drift into a state of invincibility, instruments of the liberation of the body from its repressive dose or perhaps of victories scorned.

How can one go against gossip? The only thing to do is to master appearances. Fight the state by cloning the state. Uncover the truth by cloning the counter truth. And as a result, authenticity is deprived of its origins. Visibility will be more intimate with the eternity of manipulation, a parody of organic muscles duplicating the configuration of signs but not natural identifiers, but cultural makeup. So that there is no metaphysics around the horizon in the politics of the opera game. As no one can stop laughing at it.

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