Loren Glass

Center for the Humanities
Oregon State University
loren.glass@orst.edu

 

For me an audience interminable.

 

–Walt Whitman

 

And I will make a song for the ears of the President.

 

–Walt Whitman

 

On Monday, August 17, 1998, a day that seemed to have gone down in history before it even arrived, President Bill Clinton made the obviously poll-driven and eminently quotable claim: “Even presidents have private lives.” Clinton was assuming that his national television audience distinguished between his public office and his private life, and that he could consequently convince them that his blowjobs were his business. The plethora of public opinion polls that preceded his appearance did seem to reflect a national belief that some sort of commonly understood and juridically established division between public and private is crucial not only to a healthy presidency, but to a healthy society. Clinton seemed safe in assuming that the American public would agree to let him resolve the affair privately.

 

And yet The Starr Report, certainly the most widely distributed public document in the history of the Republic, appears to have proven him wrong. Bill Clinton’s private life and personality became a vital center of public discussion in the United States and the world. The tragicomic narrative of his doomed affair with Monica Lewinsky was followed avidly by millions, if not billions, of readers. The explicit sexual details of their furtive encounters are now universally known. Never before has something so private become public so rapidly and spectacularly. In fact, I would like to claim that the explicit content and democratic distribution of The Starr Report indicate a significant transformation in the structure of the American public sphere.

 

The scandal exposed a schizophrenic split in American public subjectivity: While the polls repeatedly revealed that Americans claim to respect Clinton’s right to privacy, the intense media scrutiny clearly solicited public curiosity about how he exercises that right. The prudery of America’s public conscience collided with the prurience of its public libido.¹ Such contradictions in public subjectivity tend to have concrete symptoms, and the symptom of the Clinton Crisis couldn’t be clearer: it is the President’s penis. Not the phallus, not the symbol of his office, but his actual anatomical penis: The palpable specificity of Clinton’s penis has stood at the center of this crisis, from Jones’s allegation that she could identify its physical idiosyncrasies to Kenneth Starr’s irrefutable scientific claim that only one penis out of 7.87 trillion could have spilled the semen onto Monica Lewinsky’s dress.

 

Slavoj Zizek defines the symptom as “a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation.” This particular element is both “a point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for the field to achieve its closure” (21). Thus “freedom” as a “universal notion” is enabled by a symptomatic exception: the worker’s freedom to sell his labor, which is really the opposite of freedom. The American presidency occupies a similar relation to the ideological field of bourgeois law, which is supposedly based on impersonal norms. In a constitutional republic conceived as a “government of laws, not of men,” the President is the one man who must in turn embody the Law. In this sense, the Presidency is the enabling symptom of republican government. His personal power is the exception that proves the rule of bourgeois democracy.²

 

However, the explicit acknowledgment of the president’s anatomical masculinity pushes the logic of the symptom past the threshold of the enabling exception, threatening to generate a crisis in the ideological field of American patriarchal authority itself. As a symptom of a symptom, a concrete positivity that gives the lie to the foundational symbolic anchor of the Law, Clinton’s penis stands for an unprecedented breakdown in both the intelligibility and effectivity of that Law. In Lacanian terms, the entire edifice of male entitlement to power under the Law of the Father depends upon the ideologically crucial yet admittedly vulnerable equation between the phallus as the transcendent signifier and the penis as its anatomical referent.³ One of the principal strategies for reinforcing this equation is simply to conceal the penis. In fact, we could say that our patriarchy to a great degree depends upon concealing the anatomical penis behind the symbolic phallus. The penis–in the end a paltry thing–must be concealed if its fictional equation to the omnipotent phallus is to be sustained. And the public exposure of the penis, particularly the erect penis, has been and remains in our culture the ultimate violation of privacy, acceptable only in–and indeed partly constitutive of–the realm of pornography to which the Clinton scandal is consistently compared. Clinton’s apparent inability to restrain his libido, to keep his dick in his pants, constantly reminds us of the human penis behind the official phallus. This repeated thrusting of the pornographic penis into a public realm organized around the symbolic phallus indicates a crisis in the patriarchal structure of authority that has traditionally undergirded the American public sphere.

 

In this paper, I would like to trace the coordinates of this crisis, and its attendant risks and opportunities, across three public spaces of discourse and debate. First, I will analyze The Starr Report itself as mobilizing the contradictory appeals of what I am calling the pornographic public sphere, in which explicit discussion and representation of sexuality has come to articulate political allegiances and antagonisms. Second, I will discuss the crucial role the online magazine Salon played in framing public discussion of the scandal, in order to indicate the close relationship between new technologies of communication and new protocols of public discourse. Finally, I will conclude with a consideration of Bill and Hillary’s opaque “professional” marriage, which I believe indicates an ambiguous model of domesticity that seems to be displacing more conventional patriarchal models of the family. My argument throughout will be that the Clinton sex scandals have shown that the ideology of patriarchy is becoming increasingly unable to regulate the boundary between private life and public representation in the United States.

 

The Pornographic Public Sphere

 

Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, Voices veiled and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

 

–Walt Whitman

 

The obsessive public focus on President Clinton’s sex life, which only reached a certain apogee in The Starr Report, offers a particularly spectacular example of what Lauren Berlant has called the “intimate public sphere,” in which “narratives about sex and citizenship ha[ve] come to obsess the official national public sphere” (Queen 5). Both popular and academic intellectuals have tended to decry this privatization of public life as indicating a disintegration of the political integrity of citizenship and civil society in America.⁴ Certainly it is undeniable that there are more important political issues facing America than Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that the Clinton scandal and The Starr Report are politically insignificant, nor that they signal a further decline in the integrity of American public culture. In fact, a significant rhetorical and legal battle is being waged in America between an increasingly vocal, puritanical right wing that has used the Clinton crisis as a platform to call for abstinence until marriage, and an increasingly marginalized left wing that endorses open public discussion and expression of sexuality. I would like to argue that this struggle is getting played out in a relatively novel collective space, a space whose political possibilities are yet to be fully evaluated or explored, a space I will call the pornographic public sphere.⁵

 

This pornographic public sphere has grown out of and remains in close relation with its more traditional counterparts. Thus Habermas’s foundational definition of the Enlightenment public sphere as an arena for rational-critical debate remains central to an understanding of the Clinton scandals, and I think it is crucial that we recognize “the people’s public use of their reason” in the public reaction to and discussion of The Starr Report (27). The unprecedented free distribution of the text precipitated Internet discussions, radio and TV call-in shows, and water-cooler gossip across the nation about the relationship between private life and public office, a relationship which is, after all, a genuine political and constitutional issue. Further, it is no accident that Clinton’s lawyers in their published rebuttal to the Report attempted to clarify this relationship through recourse to the intentions of “the framers of our Constitution” by way of Alexander Hamilton’s discussion of impeachment from the Federalist 65 (445-62). Both the rational rhetoric of The Starr Report and the Clinton Rebuttal and their widespread public distribution are solidly in the tradition of Enlightenment political debate that goes back to the pamphleteering of the Revolutionary era.⁶

 

This tradition of collective discussion has always been split between the democratic scope of its philosophical rhetoric and the restricted access of its historical reality. If the public in theory has seemed to include everyone, in practice it has always involved complex structures of exclusion. In terms of gender–the principal identity category foregrounded by the Clinton scandal–these structures of exclusion can be attributed to the close historical relation between patriarchal authority and the Enlightenment public sphere. Habermas confirms that the audience-oriented subjectivity appropriate to participation in public dialogue “had its home, literally, in the sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family” (43). Euro-American patriarchy dictated the asymmetries that traditionally have restricted women’s access to public debate up to this day. Critics working in the Habermasian tradition have yet to describe a public sphere not centrally informed by patriarchy.⁷

 

The Starr Report proves that, despite the oceans and centuries that intervene between contemporary American society and the European Enlightenment that forms the focus of Habermas’s study, the categories of gender and sexuality remain central to the concept and structure of the public. Both the rhetoric and practice of modern citizenship have developed out of and remain grounded in the structure of the bourgeois nuclear family. In stage-managing an adulterous affair into a constitutional crisis, the Starr investigation foregrounded the persistent connections between the patriarchal family and the public sphere in America, and revealed how the psycho-sexual tensions of the former can generate social symptoms in the latter.

 

Traditionally, the psycho-sexual drama of the patriarchal conjugal family has been played out in the novel and its various mass-mediated offspring. Habermas affirms that the audience-oriented subjectivity of the family found its signal expression in “the domestic novel, the psychological description in autobiographical form” (49). And, as many scholars have affirmed, if the rational-critical debate of the political extensions of the public sphere is traditionally gendered male, then the novelistic discourses that instantiate private subjectivity are traditionally gendered female.⁸ It was frequently through the genre of the novel that women were able to gain the public voice denied them in more traditional political venues.

 

Thus it is highly significant that, dominated as The Starr Report is by the two men whose public struggle it documents, the central narrative therein is told by a woman. “Monica’s story,” as it has come to be called, complements the rational appeal of a constitutional debate with the affective appeal of a romance novel. And, just as it is crucial that we respect the rationality of the constitutional debate, it is equally important that we respect the authentic emotional appeal of Lewinsky’s narrative.⁹

 

This emotional appeal is rooted in the affair’s very conventionality. Here Monica narrates her first private meeting with Bill Clinton:

 

We talked briefly and sort of acknowledged that there had been a chemistry that was there before and that we were both attracted to each other and then he asked me if he could kiss me.

 

Starr himself simply and sensitively concludes the inaugural moment: “In the windowless hallway adjacent to the study, they kissed” (72). Lewinsky and Starr in essence collaborate in weaving a deeply conventional narrative of the development, consummation, and disintegration of a doomed romance into the dryer fabric of legalistic detection that frames the Report as a whole.

 

For the most part, however, this romantic narrative is told in Monica’s words and remains firmly anchored in her emotional universe. She reports upon her uncertainties: “I didn’t know if this was developing into some kind of longer term relationship than what I thought it initially might have been” (82). In letters written but never sent she expresses her frustrations with the President: “I was so sure that the weekend after the election you would call me to come visit and you would kiss me passionately and tell me you couldn’t wait to have me back” (104). When Clinton gives her a special edition of Leaves of Grass, she calls it “the most sentimental gift he had given me… it’s beautiful” (114). Finally, Lewinsky speaks for Clinton himself, as she recounts a July 4 discussion between them over the possibility of their marrying after he leaves the White House: “And he said, well, I don’t know, I might be alone in three years…. I think I kind of said, oh, I think we’d be a good team…. And he… jokingly said, well, what are we going to do when I’m 75 and I have to pee 25 times a day?” At this point, she “just knew that he was in love with me” (128).

 

Once the lawyers and the media close in and the affair gradually unravels, the Report has established its emotional core in the voice of its primary witness. And the appeal of “Monica’s Story” is only enhanced by the dramatic irony created by our knowledge of the tragic denouement. Thus the “narrative” that constitutes “Part One” of The Starr Report is a love story which all but obligates its audience to sympathize with its central female voice. The sober and impersonal public appeal of the “Introduction” and the “Grounds” sandwiches this narrative solicitation of the reader’s emotional susceptibilities.

 

Of course, affect and argument have always been entangled in the various articulations of the modern American public; and on this level Starr’s interweaving of a romantic narrative and a juridical dilemma is nothing new. It simply demonstrates his and our familiarity with the formula for classical Hollywood narrative, that ubiquitous “machine for the production of the American couple.” Combining a love story and a crime story is one of the central recipes for mainstream American film. The telic momentum of this narrative interweaving tends toward the achievement of some overlapping truth: the truth of the relationship in love or separation and the truth of the crime in guilt or innocence. In mainstream film, this truth almost always represents a containment of the ideological threats the story has posed to the sanctioned norms of heterosexual coupling.

 

In The Starr Report, however, the “truth” toward which the narrative moves represents an unprecedented ideological unmasking of the very subjective and sexual capacities that generated it in the first place. For the truth that The Starr Report establishes beyond the shadow of a doubt is, once again, the president’s penis. On this level, the Report is a pornographic narrative that begins with Monica’s exposure of “the straps of her thong underwear,” moves through Clinton’s historic insertion of “a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky’s vagina,” and concludes with the money shot of the President ejaculating on Lewinsky’s “navy blue dress from the Gap.” These almost awkwardly pornographic episodes are punctuated throughout by interrupted blowjobs, such that Clinton’s ejaculation becomes the climax for which the preceding narrative is only foreplay. The semen stain then becomes the ultimate proof both of the love demanded by the love story and of the crime implicit in the detection process. It is the signature that confers authenticity on the narrative.

 

This authenticity gives the lie to the conventional truths normally endorsed by such narratives, and in the process overturns one of the constitutive exclusions of American public discourse. For if the classical and mass-cultural versions of the public sphere have always been somewhat entangled, pornography has persisted as their dialectical underbelly; in fact, one could venture a sort of negative definition of this notoriously slippery zone of representation as that which constitutes the dominant public by exclusion. Thus Sade has remained as central to an understanding of the Enlightenment as Rousseau, Addison, or Franklin. In the eighteenth century, sexual passion emerged as antithetical to disinterested reason, and the graphic textual solicitation of sexual desire became the shadowy counterpart to the public appeal to reason.¹⁰ This dialectical coupling persisted even as emerging mass-cultural texts and images became understood in libidinal terms. The cyclical moral panics about the sexual depravity of popular narratives and the eventual hegemony of the pseudo-Freudian cliché that “sex sells” in advertising have both occurred within a mass-cultural public sphere that excludes the graphic depiction of sexual acts. Until recently, pornography was a hidden subculture defined by its complete exclusion from mainstream public culture.

 

This began to change in the fifties and sixties, with the historically overlapping emergence of men’s magazines like Playboy, the sexual revolution of the sixties, and the women’s movement. The success of Playboy and the magazine industry it spawned established “male” sexuality as a viable commercial market and forged a sustaining link between that market and more highbrow intellectual public discussion. In the sixties, popular intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and Norman O. Brown confirmed a connection between sexual and political liberation for the post-war New Left, whose challenge to traditional sexual morés became a central trope in media coverage of political events in that decade. Finally, the feminist tenet that the “personal is political” confirmed sexuality, gender relations, and pornography as crucial areas of public debate.¹¹

 

The generic syncretism of The Starr Report indexes the complex and contradictory appeals of the public sphere that have emerged out of this gradual entry of sexually explicit representations and references into public discussion. Despite its patently partisan motives, the Starr investigation nevertheless staged a classic appeal to reason, asking us to adjudicate the relation between the private behavior of the President and the integrity of his public office. The story behind the crisis staged a mass-cultural appeal to affect, asking us to share in the pleasure and pain of a doomed love affair. The sexual images and acts that constitute the “truth” behind both former appeals forced a fascinated public attention toward the spectacle of the pornographic penis heretofore excluded from democratic display.

 

Disembodied Seduction

 

The earth to be spanned, connected by network.

 

–Walt Whitman

 

This messy intermixture of rational debate, sentimental narrative, and sexually explicit representations also characterizes the new media that many blame for precipitating the Clinton crisis in the first place. Ever since the story first broke in the Drudge Report, the country’s cultural elite has blamed the Internet for thrusting such trivial trash into public attention. Spokespeople for the traditional media outlets complain that the uniquely democratic architecture of relatively unregulated access which characterizes the Internet–at least for now–threatens the distinctions between elite media and tabloid trash. Thus Seth Schiesel, writing in the New York Times, warns that “a result of the essential democracy, or anarchy, of the Internet is that established news organs have no more claim to screen space than basement efforts.” The traditional news media hierarchy of highbrow academic analysis, middlebrow journalistic reportage, and lowbrow sensationalist exposé–a hierarchy reinforced by a stratified public and by separate venues of production and reception–no longer seems sustainable in a virtual geography that configures all information identically.

 

Other intellectuals, both popular and academic, celebrate this virtual confusion as heralding a new form of public sphere that promises democratic participation beyond anything the founding fathers could have imagined. Thus Mark Poster argues that the Internet diminishes “prevailing hierarchies of race, class, and especially gender,” and can therefore “serve the function of a Habermasian public sphere” (213). And Jon Katz, one of the emerging gurus of Internet democracy, compares the “digital revolution” to the American revolution, proudly citing U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Stewart Dalzell’s claim that “the Internet ha achieved… the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country–and indeed the world–has yet seen” (54).

 

The Clinton crisis was in a sense manufactured both for and by this new public marketplace, where everything from policy debates to popular culture to pornographic videos are available in the privacy of your home with the simple click of a mouse. Clinton’s unprecedented brand of pornographic celebrity has been at least partly enabled by this new proximity, and some of the most interesting discussions of the scandal’s significance have occurred in the new media.

 

This intimate relation between the Internet and the Clinton scandal was confirmed when the online magazine Salon broke the story of Henry Hyde’s adulterous affair. Salon is a far cry from the Drudge Report. Founded in 1995, it has since been deemed “Web Site of the Year” for 1996 by Time Magazine and “Best Website” of 1997 by Entertainment Weekly; and it won the Webby Award for “Best Online Magazine” in 1997 and 1998. Salon became a clearinghouse for information and discussion on the Clinton scandal, greatly expanding both its corporate sponsorship and its reader base in the process. It provides an excellent case study in the coordination of Internet publicity and Clintonian salacity.

 

Salon‘s editors explicitly endorse the Enlightenment ideal of “the search for knowledge through conversation with others.” In his “Brief History of Salons,” executive editor Gary Kamiya reminds us that this ideal has had as much to do with drawing room gossip as it had with abstract rationality. Kamiya sees the Internet as “an instrument of disembodied seduction… in the finest salon tradition.” Thus Salon, which boasts contributions from such popular contemporary luminaries as Susie Bright, Jon Carroll, Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Richard Rodriguez, presents itself as a (safe) sexy public sphere, a cross between enlightened rationality and bohemian rhapsody. The extensive discussion of the Clinton scandal that appears on its pages offers a fruitful illustration of some of the possibilities opened up by the breakdown in the traditional protocols of public discussion.

 

Two of Salon‘s most prominent columnists–Susie Bright and Camille Paglia–were particularly provocative in their deployment of pornographic public personae. When the scandal first broke, Bright, celebrity sex theorist and author of The Sexual State of the Union, light-heartedly identified with Clinton’s problems. In those frenzied weeks, Bright reported “a certain erotic kinship with the president today, a level of connection that transcends my normal role as his neglected constituent and makes me feel, at the very least, like more of a psychic friend.” In fact, at the height of the scandal, Bright exploited the perpetual present of cyberspace by claiming to “know what the president wants right now, and I do mean right this second… Right now, what President Clinton wants is to get laid.” In fact, “our president could use about a dozen blow jobs right now, in rapid succession, from a series of adoring fresh faces who would offer the sweetest solace, the most nurturing, ego-affirming escape hatch ever devised between a pair of lips.” But Bright’s voice doesn’t emanate from these lips. She could never give the president a blowjob because “I’m too much like him. I’m erotically oriented toward my clitoris, and on those uncomfortable occasions when someone asked ME to begin and end a sexual episode by performing a blow job, my selfish thought was always, “What’s in this for me?” (“I Know”).¹²

 

Bright leverages her identification with Clinton into a call for more open public discussion of sexual preferences and dispositions. She is overjoyed that Clinton has “driven a stake into the mandate for penis-vagina, missionary position sex,” proving thereby that “you can have the hottest, most crazed sexual affair ever and never even exchange bodily fluids!” The Clinton crisis provided Bright with a platform from which to call for “a sense of democracy and accountability that is bigger than any one man’s dick,” a public culture in which we would all “have the courage to talk about [our] erotic convictions like they counted for something” (“School”). Bright has elsewhere endorsed the Internet as an ideal space for precisely such a “democratic discussion,” in which we could productively and openly ponder the similarities between Bill Clinton’s penis and Susie Bright’s clitoris (Sexual 221).¹³

 

Paglia also saw the Clinton crisis in terms of challenges to sex roles and gender identity. In her Salon column, “online advice for the culturally disgruntled,” Paglia characterizes Clinton as “literally omnivorous: He would gobble up all the hamburgers and women in the world, if he could…. He wants to suck everything up, have it all, cram life with every sensation and emotion…. He has the complexity of a great star–like Judy Garland or Joan Crawford. Yes the only analogies to him are female, not male.” Deploying the crude psychoanalysis for which she is notorious, Paglia attributes this omnivorous orality to Clinton’s fatherlessness. In essence, Clinton has “more of a mother problem than a woman problem”; he has “problems separating his own identity from that of women.” Instead of being a patriarchal figure, Clinton becomes a sort of devouring mother whose “[c]rimes are incestuous: He makes the whole world his family and then seduces and pollutes it, person by person” (“Why”).

 

And, of course, if Clinton is the mother, Hillary must be the father. By a peculiar psychoanalytic inversion, “Bill is the lush, disorderly id, while Hillary is the prim, censorious superego keeping it all in check.” Paglia has been the chief propagandist for the lesbian “ice queen” image of Hillary that has always complemented Clinton’s classically feminine fluid ego boundaries. According to Paglia, “Hillary’s mind is stone cold–an intimidating abstract state that women must learn to occupy” in our modern post-feminist corporate world. But the first lady shields her masculine mind behind an icily female exterior, making her “a drag queen, the magnificent final product of a long process of self transformation from butch to femme” (“First”).¹⁴

 

If Bright identifies with Bill Clinton, Paglia openly admits that she identifies “strongly with [Hillary] and recognize[s] in her present difficulties an echo of my own career disasters.” And Paglia leverages this identification into an indictment of Bill Clinton as a new breed of feminist-friendly philanderer, who has introduced a new post-patriarchal double bind for the American woman: he’s replaced the classically Victorian virgin/whore complex with a new postmodern lesbian/whore complex. Clinton gladly concedes power to careerist “ice queens” like Hillary Rodham, Janet Reno, and Madeleine Albright, while eagerly pursuing blowjobs from trashy young sluts like Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones. As a model of the new sensitive male, he can have his cake and eat it, too.

 

The End of Patriarchy?

 

Bright’s and Paglia’s columns not only confirm the crucial importance of the Internet in propagating and processing the Clinton scandal, they also confirm Jennifer Wicke’s contention that, in the nineties, “the celebrity zone is the public sphere where feminism is negotiated” (757). In fact, celebrity feminism and the Clinton presidency are historically coincident. The gradual eclipse of grassroots movement feminism by high profile celebrities such as Paglia, Bright, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, Susan Powter, and others has paralleled the Clintons’ rise to power. Hillary Clinton herself should be included in the ranks of celebrity feminists whose new prominence indexes the degree to which political struggles over sexuality and gender relations are being negotiated in the mass-cultural public sphere. In fact, the intense scrutiny of Bill and Hillary’s private lives reveals how extensively politics in general is increasingly imbricated in the culture of celebrity.¹⁵

 

The Clintons accommodate their mass-cultural celebrity to their political power through the image of the consummate professional. Both Clintons are perceived as highly intelligent, technocratic, careerist pragmatists. In fact, insofar as the vision of the “professional couple” is a focus-group-driven product of the Clinton administration’s professional media team, it is a product of itself: “professionalism” is both the manufactured image and the working reality of the Clinton White House. Even their personal relationship is increasingly characterized as pragmatic and professional; their marriage seems to be a “working” relationship, in both senses of the term.

 

The Clinton crisis must be understood as a collision between the new middle-class model of the dual-career marriage and the political volatility of the culture of celebrity. The Clintons are the first first couple to explicitly present to the American public a marriage in which both parents work, and in which, to a great degree, the marriage itself is seen as work. Laura Kipnis has eloquently discussed the symbolic role adultery plays in this regime:

 

In the Marriage Takes Work regime of normative intimacy, when the work shift ends and the domestic shift begins hardly makes much difference; from surplus labor to surplus monogamy is a short, easy commute. Under conditions of surplus monogamy, adultery--a sphere of purposelessness, outside contracts, not colonized by the logic of productivity and the performance principle--becomes something beyond a structural impossibility. It's a counterlogic to the prevailing system. (298)

 

Certainly Clinton’s ill-advised dalliance with Lewinsky occurred in this “sphere of purposelessness.” Even those who didn’t find it immoral still thought it was irredeemably “stupid.” Nevertheless, as a series of desperate encounters squeezed into a schedule so busy and a space so small, it tragically underscores the scarce opportunities for pleasure in a regime so tightly and obsessively organized around work.

 

Significantly, Bill Clinton works at home. The White House is both a residence and an office; it is architecturally constructed and symbolically understood to contain both domestic and professional activities under one roof. Thus if Clinton represents the regime of all-consuming careerism that characterizes the culture of the Baby-Boom generation, Monica Lewinsky enters–youthful, underpaid, and single–as a Generation-X dream of leisure, a “structural impossibility” for such a busy man. The Starr Report illustrates this quite clearly. As Clinton repeatedly rebuffs Lewinsky, the contrast between his busyness and her idleness comes to the fore. The more he neglects her with the excuse of “work,” the more she spends her free time drafting letters and gossiping. Lewinsky’s only escape, and both she and Clinton knew this, was to use her leverage with him to get a high-paying professional job. But when the scandal broke she was forced into perpetual idleness–she was unemployed, couldn’t even go out in public, and was relegated to helping her lawyers with their filing–while Clinton increasingly immersed himself in the distraction of “work.” And it was in the end Clinton’s professional work ethic that kept his approval ratings so high: as the polls incessantly reminded us, most Americans thought he was “doing a good job.”

 

Thus the final symptomatic irony of the Clinton scandal is that the affair that threatened the marriage confirms masculine entitlement to political power, while the marriage that was threatened has become a model of political gender equality. It is increasingly perceived as a “professional” relationship, a marriage without sex. The more the public absorbs of Clinton’s image as a philanderer, the less it can imagine any sexual intimacy with Hillary. The two are in effect assumed to be mutually exclusive. In fact, however, this is the region–the actual bedroom behavior of Bill and Hillary–in which the Clintons really seem to have retained a modicum of privacy. Everyone knows what Bill and Monica did, but the nature of intimate relations between Bill and Hillary Clinton remains open to speculation.

 

Are they happy? Do they have sex? Do they have an “arrangement” about infidelity? Does Hillary also engage in extramarital affairs? What are her sexual preferences? Bell hooks–quoted, of course, in Salon–has an interesting, if partial, answer:

 

Nobody understands that women can feel relieved sometimes when their husband is fucking someone else. It's hard to satisfy men with big egos.... In terms of their relationship, they are the most progressive couple we've ever had in the White House. People want to make them pay for that. It would be the most positive thing for our culture if we respected the love between Hillary and her man. We need a love ethic at the seat of power.... Their relationship is based on respect and love. Not necessarily on sex. (Peri and Leibovich)

 

Love in the marriage and sex outside it, at least for the man: this is certainly one of the more prevalent images we have of the first couple. But Hillary’s sexuality remains a cipher on which the progressiveness of hooks’s model hinges. Certainly a power couple with a philandering husband and a frustrated wife is not terribly new.

 

What sort of a “family” did Bill Clinton want to retreat into when he made his famous declaration of privacy? His and Hillary’s political careers and personal lives span the rise and fall of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement in America, and the complex opacity of their relationship reveals that the connection between the patriarchal conjugal family and the public sphere has in our age become a contradiction. That contradiction, I believe, has generated a crisis around the articulation of their specific family dynamics and their political power.

 

In order to evaluate fully the significance of this crisis, the question of the Clintons’ private happiness is, I believe, crucial, if finally unanswerable. Have they introduced an emotionally fulfilling family model that articulates with a political public sphere no longer based in patriarchy, or have they simply updated the psychic and material oppression of the conventional nuclear family for a post-political world? Does the scandal confirm Kipnis’s assertion of “both the impossibility of living by the rules of conventional ideologies of intimacy, and the dangerous impossibility of making happiness any sort of a political demand” (319)? Or does it prove, as hooks claims or hopes, that we actually do have a “love ethic at the seat of power.” Maybe, in some dialectical joke on us, the answer is both.

 

But who is the “us” on which this joke is being played? And do we, in the end, get it? Kipnis’s article, entitled simply “Adultery,” is the first essay in the Winter 1998 special issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to “Intimacy.” That this special issue–edited by Lauren Berlant and including contributions from many of the most influential academic luminaries of the contemporary critical moment–came out the very month the Clinton crisis broke is almost enough to make one believe in synchronicity. Kipnis recognizes Clinton as our “Libido in Chief” (314), and sees our current obsession with his adulterous behavior as a reminder that “toxic levels of everyday unhappiness or grinding boredom are the functional norm in many lives and marriages” (319). For Kipnis, adultery emerges as a fleeting utopian moment of pleasure in this marriage regime completely dedicated to work. She concludes by urging her audience–whom she addresses as “we avant-gardistes of everyday life, we emergent utopians who experimentally construct different futures out of whatever we can” (327)–to make “an unembarrassed commitment to utopian thinking” (326). Kipnis’s essay functions both as an introduction and as a gauntlet to the essays that follow; she offers adultery as an inchoate zone of utopian practice upon which her colleagues might built a theory.

 

Kipnis notably represents her audience as workaholic professionals, and it is in this operative assumption that we see the intimate overlap between her audience and the demographic to whom Salon is addressed. The average household income of a Salon reader is $69,500; 85% are college graduates; 59% are categorized as “professionals.”¹⁶ Critical Inquiry‘s readers might not make quite as much money, but I think we can presume that both of these publications address what one might call the intellectual vanguard of the American professional-managerial class.

 

If the Clinton scandal represents a crisis in the social reproduction and public representation of this professional-managerial class, Critical Inquiry and Salon are public spaces in which it is attempting both to exploit and to resolve its latest crisis. And, judging by the success of Salon, we’re doing quite well. In 1997, PC Week wondered whether “a quality publication can make a profit on the web” (Diamond). Pundits and commentators were skeptical as to whether Salon‘s highbrow pretensions could meet the Internet’s corporate bottom lines. Since the Clinton scandal broke, Salon has signed a two-year deal with Barnes and Noble to sell books online, and has recently hooked up with the search engine Go.com, partially owned by the Disney Corporation. Salon now has its hands in some pretty deep pockets; the pornographic public sphere appears to be here to stay.

 

In the pages of Salon and Critical Inquiry, then, we witness a class fragment formulating a new discourse of self-presentation in the public sphere, and searching for new models of domesticity and intimacy in a corporate order that places enormous stress (in both senses of the word) on the conventional couple form. And yet, one can’t help but feel that this corporate order in fact thrives on this very crisis and that capitalism–far from relying on an established patriarchy–continuously reproduces its middle classes through offering us the utopian vertigo of its disintegration. The President’s penis, in the end, could be a harbinger of a future American society in which capitalism no longer depends on patriarchy.

 

Notes

 

1. This schizophrenic split is most effectively registered by polls that asked respondents to speculate on the public itself. Thus in a February 1998 poll taken by CBS news, only 7% of respondents said they were fascinated by Clinton’s sex life; but 25% thought other people were fascinated, and 49% said other people were at least mildly curious (Berke).

 

Such responses confirm that public subjectivity is not directly reducible to the individual sensibilities of those solicited by it; rather, the public subject emerges from the manner in which we are solicited. Michael Warner has effectively theorized this relation: “no matter what particularities of culture, race, and gender, or class we bring to bear on public discourse, the moment of apprehending something as public is one in which we imagine, if imperfectly, indifference to those particularities, to ourselves. We adopt the attitude of the public subject marking to ourselves its nonidentity with ourselves” (377). It is this public subject that found itself split between prudery and prurience by the Clinton scandal.

 

2. Presidential scholar Richard Neustadt confirms that “the same conditions that promote [the President’s] leadership in form preclude a guarantee of his leadership in fact” (8). Neustadt differentiates between formal powers, which he associates with the constitutional position of the president as simply a clerk or office boy for the legislature, and power tout court, which he sees as a question of “personal influence.” For a recent discussion of the contradictory nature of the presidency, see Cronin and Genovese (1-29).

 

3. For an excellent discussion of how American patriarchy relies on the mystified equation between the penis and the phallus, see Silverman (15-52). For the source of the distinction in Lacan, see Feminine Sexuality, in particular Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s introductions, and the essays “The Meaning of the Phallus” (74-86) and “The Phallic Phase and the Subjective Import of the Castration Complex” (99-123). Lauren Berlant confirms that “male embodiment itself threatens to collapse the public authority of patriarchy” (Anatomy 121).

 

4. Berlant herself unequivocally proclaims that her “first axiom is that there is no public sphere in the contemporary United States, no context of communication and debate that makes ordinary citizens feel that they have a common public culture” (Queen 3). See also Jeffrey Rosen’s discussions of the Clinton scandal for The New Republic, “The End of Privacy” and “I Pry.” Both foundational studies of the rise of the “public” in the eighteenth century–The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and The Fall of Public Man–correlate its decline with the mass-cultural focus on private personalities. See Habermas (141-59, 181-211), and Sennett (150-95).

 

5. My understanding of the term “pornographic public sphere” emerged out of discussions with Helen Thompson concerning the political significance of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and The Starr Report. Helen’s thinking about pornography and the public has deeply influenced my own in this section.

 

6. Few would characterize the public discussion of the Clinton/Lewinksy scandal as rational, but I would argue that our very understanding of “rationality” must be revised if we are to apply it intelligibly to the contemporary mass public. It is worth reminding ourselves, in this regard, of Walter Benjamin’s characterization of the modern public as “a collectivity in a state of distraction” (239). According to Benjamin, “the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one” (241). Benjamin’s approach saves us from easy dismissals of the participatory mechanisms of mass mediated spectacles. Thus we can understand public discussion of the Clinton scandal as a mass-cultural version of “distracted” rational-critical debate.

 

7. Feminist scholarship on Habermas has focused on precisely this problem. In addition to Berlant, see Fraser, Ryan, Young, Landes, and Hansen, all of whom critique Habermas toward the end of adapting the emancipatory extensions of his theory for a feminist critical program.

 

8. See, for example, Watt, Showalter, and Armstrong.

 

9. On the political significance of the mass-market romance, see Radway.

 

10. On the prehistory of pornography and its modern invention during the Enlightenment, see Hunt.

 

11. On the history and theory of modern pornography, see Williams and Kendrick. On the political significance of pornography for the postwar generations and the women’s movement, see Lederer and Ross (171-209).

 

12. Bright found The Starr Report itself “ANTI-erotic,” mostly because she saw it as part of a sustained pattern of right-wing co-optation of left-wing sex talk (“Hijacked”). Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the crisis itself provided an unprecedented forum for Bright’s views on the public discussion of sexuality.

 

13. Mark Poster affirms that the Internet “produces a new relation to one’s body as it communicates, a cyborg in cyberspace who is different from all the embodied genders of earlier modes of information” (212-13). On how the concept of the cyborg challenges conventional gender identity, see Haraway (149-83).

 

14. This gender-bendy image of the Clintons is at the center of Joe Klein’s thinly veiled portrayal of Jack and Susan Stanton in both his originally anonymous runaway bestseller Primary Colors, and in the subsequent film. Midway through the book, in a scene significantly left out of the film, a former classmate of Stanton remembers: “He was needy the way a woman is, he needed the physical proximity.” Susan Stanton, on the other hand, is compared to a toothpaste commercial, with an “invisible protective shield [that] didn’t just stop at the mouth” (370-71).

 

It is far from incidental that this former classmate is an African-American woman who had been Stanton’s girlfriend in college. In fact, Primary Colors, the story of a white southern governor’s pursuit of the democratic presidential nomination as narrated through the eyes of his black campaign manager, crucially relates the post-women’s movement gender politics of the Clinton presidency to its post-civil rights approach to race issues, and these also, interestingly, turn on the boundary between the President’s public and private behavior. The novel symbolically opens in Harlem and its narrator is the yuppie grandson of a slain civil rights leader clearly modeled on Martin Luther King, Jr. However, though Henry Burton, the central voice and moral center of the narrative, sees himself as black, his mother is white and, in the end, it is the “private” issue of interracial sex and marriage which makes the title Primary Colors into a double entendre. The central crisis of the narrative turns on the possibility that Jack Stanton impregnated the African-American teenage daughter of the local proprietor of his favorite barbecue joint. Susan Stanton’s discovery of the rumor drives her, “the world’s most fortified bunker,” into Burton’s bed (340). And the revelation toward the end of the novel that Stanton did at least have sex with the girl precipitates Burton’s final loss of innocence.

 

It is worth comparing this near obsession with interracial sex in Primary Colors to the issues raised by the Lewinsky scandal. For it is a matter of public knowledge that Clinton exclusively preferred oral sex with Lewinsky, that he propositioned oral sex to Paula Jones, and that he believes that oral sex doesn’t count as “sexual relations.” If we accept the obvious equation between Stanton and Clinton, however, we see that the case is different when the young woman is black. If Clinton gets blowjobs from young white girls, he apparently prefers to inseminate young black girls. In other words, sex would appear to be the answer Primary Colors offers to America’s persistent race problem. If the title refers to skin color as well as party colors, then the only partially hidden message is confirmed: you only get the “full picture” if you mix the primary colors. Not surprisingly, Warren Beatty–certainly a contemporary of the Clintons–offers a similar solution in his recent satire Bulworth, in which the rapping white senator proposes that we all have sex until we become the same color. It is as if the only way to solve the intransigent “race problem” were to eliminate race, and the only way to eliminate race is to have interracial sex.

 

15. For a discussion of the increasing interpenetration of political power and the culture of celebrity, see Marshall (203-51).

 

16. Demographic information about Salon‘s readership can be found on the “Salon Fact Sheet” (http://www.salonmagazine.com/press/fact/).

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