Because all our categories of judgment fail on Fabrizio Corona

The other evening two people were sitting in front of the television. One willingly, the other reluctantly watched the episode of that show, program, the hour and a half thing that Fabrizio Corona produces, writes and records. It’s a monologue, him alone in a black-lined bunker room on a stool. Legs open, cool poses. The characteristic of the format – apart from an audience of millions of viewers – is that after each episode Corona’s lawyer is assigned at least three new complaints for minor crimes. Viewing the youtube product supra generates different reactions: the two guinea pigs in front of the television alternate several hands on their foreheads with exclamations “it’s not possible, this is crazy” (the episode opens with a very frontal attack on the Milan prosecutor’s office, with surnames, an impressive contempt for the danger). Guilty giggles. Many “Holy Gods”. Only one certainty emerges during the viewing: that Corona has survival income well stored abroad (underground) and cannot be attacked by very certain compensation sentences.

Why are those two guinea pigs important, including me, in front of the TV? Because the reaction is identical. Inability to formulate any evaluation, to observe the phenomenon and give its coordinates. It’s as if we suddenly no longer have the capital of opinion. For an hour the spectator is immersed in a nameless liquid, the liquid chemically contrary to the one in which we are immersed every day, that of easy opinion. I’ll try to explain better. Let’s take the forest family, which has been plaguing us for three weeks, and will be the mainstream at Christmas dinner. Let’s also take the serious topics: Trump; economic maneuver. The indignation is modular here. The good thing about these arguments is the two rows of chairs from which the prosecution and defense can argue. Watching Corona fails to be a critical exercisenotice the cognitive friction as you think about the subject. We don’t know what to say. Not due to lack of information. It’s not even because the data is missing, on the contrary they are known, already judged and sentenced. It’s just that a chasm has opened up between those facts and any attempt at judgment. There is a stable short circuit on this story that makes any evaluation with the moral and cultural tools, whatever you prefer, an impracticable failure.

Corona’s story is not to be deciphered. On the contrary, it is so linear that it becomes heavily didactic, so it is very easy to tell it up to a certain point. 1990s and early 2000s: the entrepreneurship of gossip, the use of compromising photography as economic leverage. If you pay me I don’t talk, a kind of blackmail economy. Gossip was an industry. The mechanism holds up as long as it can hold up, after a few years of capitalization it breaks, because under the system you find the prosecutors and it was only a matter of days. With Vallettopoli came the charges of extortion, and then the exemplary sentence. The system hits its most visible interpreter. It was a convenient operation because he was a detestable arrogant man, and so he remained, with permanent contempt for the rules and hints (several) of unreason. Something breaks already after the conviction. Which was supposed to be symbolic but doesn’t work as a warning. The unpunished has been condemned but seems more unpunished than before: he works a miracle, he escapes the pedagogical use of himself as a school case. Prison is another set, find a way to incorporate it into the character. Even with grotesque stories. Botox in prison will crumble any residue of seriousness of the punitive device. Morality rebounds again because the subject is obstinate in not responding to any order of premise and consequence.

When it comes out in 2021, the world has changed. The gossip that had given him an identity is gone, or at least it no longer resembles what it was. Corona immediately understands that he doesn’t have to rebuild anything, just move. Now visibility has become starter, so gossip is self-induced and offered. The scandal only terrifies a bourgeoisie old fashionedsmaller and smaller, and not even always. After memory, shame also died with social media. Corona returns to this new world as a perfectly adapted animal. There’s no need to hunt for photographs anymore, just tell the story. People expose themselves because it pays off. Here Corona is no longer the bad guy. The villain is a very tidy narrative figure who only works by contrast, since there is good on the other side. He is of no use to any of this. It’s the point where logic and morality split together. If you judge it with ethical criteria you are a loser, and if you analyze it rationally it works even less: the behavior deviates and you are left with the syllogism in hand. Better: if you defend him you look like an accomplice, if you attack him you look like a fool.

Does he remain an unidentified object of public life, then? Corona is not the degeneration of something, it is the pure functioning of a system but we don’t know which one (is it the new society? Do we have to get used to it?). This is why every time it reappears with new stories, and true or false or mixed materials, the same thing always happens: we don’t know where to watch it from. Every reflection is wrong, yet all thoughts seem plausible for a few seconds, then collapse. Because there is no axis on which to place oneself. Because the judgment system still presupposes a shared pact that he has long since stopped recognizing, and which perhaps we no longer consider entirely valid. He is doing very well in this post-post Corona era, he lives exactly at the point where the system eats until it bursts. The discomfort it causes doesn’t come from what it does, it comes from the impossibility of thinking about it with the categories we use for everything else. And in my opinion the matter could be a masterpiece or a huge problem, I still don’t have a precise opinion.