Paris in the Springtime

'To you and to everyone. She had only to be what she is – and to be it all round. If she's charming, how can she help it? So it was, and so only, that she “acted” - as the Borgia wine used to act. One saw it come over them – the extent to which, in her particular way, a woman, a woman other, and so other, than themselves, could be charming. One saw them understand and exchange looks, then one saw them lose heart and decide to move. For what they had to take home was that it's she who's the real thing.'

(The Golden Bowl by Henry James. I've tried reading it before and got about halfway. This time I intend to finish. I seem to be enjoying it more this time. I think. I'm still only about 100 pages in (114 to be precise, the page from which the above quotation, which I will get to, comes from), but it seems to be making sense this time. I began rereading after listing to Joanna Newsom's Ys and the similarities struck me. Ys is an album I've had difficulty getting into, but, like The Golden Bowl, I'm enjoying it more than I used to. The similarity that struck me was the amount of concentration necessary for them. Joanna Newsom: so many words, so intricately strung together, so much to hear. So that if one misses something, let's one's mind drift off for a second, that's it, the thread has gone. Henry James too. And in both cases it's not that they are badly put together, they are too well put together; the sentences, long affairs, so many clauses but always flowing, are always perfect. There's a sentence in the Author's Preface to The Golden Bowl which I keep meaning to put up here, probably right at the top somewhere summing things up as well as it does, but I never get round to it, copying text from books can be a trifle dull, especially as my typing skills are such that I have to look at the keys as I write and that slows things down considerably. I'll get round to it. Let us end this diversion here: read The Golden Bowl, read all of Henry James.)

I didn't mean to start my Paris Hilton piece with this quotation, but it struck me as apt when I came across it. I was going to start it like this: Paris Hilton occupies a peculiar position in modern culture. Her position is not unique – Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan to name a few more – successful women who enjoy themselves too much.

What the quotation adds is the difference between Paris and the others: Paris is the real thing. Paris, in the popular perception, works at enjoyment. The others enjoy themselves and work. One can see this difference in the attitude of Perez Hilton (my reading of Perez doesn't constitute one of my guilty pleasures simply because reading his site is never a pleasure) to Britney Spears: to a new picture of her boozing or whatever, he'll berate her, to news that she has stopped drinking, started doing some work on her music or whatever, he'll praise her and wish it to continue. His reticence to Paris is perhaps borne, not of some 'friendship', but from the fact that Paris cannot enter into this binary logic, for her work is enjoyment, her drugs, her booze, her parties.

So why do we hate Paris? Here I think we should consider a psychoanalytical analysis of racism from Zizek (without wishing to equate the hatred of a rich white woman (a rich white woman whose racist behaviour has been documented) with racism):

We always impute to the “other” an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. ... What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us

Paris is a symbol of this “excessive enjoyment”, and given the media portrayal of Paris we should also add here Lacan's statement that 'Jouissance is what serves no purpose'.

The final point to be made is that, and anyone who has seen any of Paris' “home movies” will confirm, there is not a lot of pleasure in the work of Jouissance: 'Jouissance is suffering' (Lacan).