CITIZEN CAMERON 105
provided a caveated apology for the possibility of the whole thing being “a case of
mistaken identity” (Ashcroft and Oakeshott 2015a: 53).
The functional understanding of a scandalous disclosure has little to do with any
objective truth the whistle-blower is supposed to reveal. Scandal, in fact, is much less
elementary to the truth quotient contained in this act of disclosure, since the meaning
and value of what gets disclosed is almost always subjected to the popular
interpretation it inculcates on mediatised platforms. Thompson (2000: 61) points out
that the mediated nature of the event of the scandal as “they are events which are
constituted in part by mediated forms of communication”. Specifically, there needs to
be a mediated publication of a scandal involving a form of dramatised narrativisation
that would need to be recalibrated and inviting sanction. The disclosure is
foreshadowed by the offering of what is shocking, sensational and abnormal
(Ekström, 2000). The scandal was sparked by an article published in the Daily Mail
on 20 September 2015 prior to the release of the book (Ashcroft 2015b). The act of
highlighting certain events in a newspaper article with greater accessibility (and
perhaps greater acceptability) repackaged the disclosure and facilitated the scandal by
bracketing off a particular event. This bracketing can appear to be something that is
caused by the sheer weight of the disclosure but, in reality, it is what lends this event
its magnitude. The ordinary elevates to the sublime. In the same way
recontextualising entails an element of bracketing, the anecdote undergoes a form of
remediation when it is lifted as an excerpt from the book and placed in the news with
an assertion of the sensational, albeit with a lesser degre e of potency. The intention is
not in any way to suggest that the remediation has the same potency of transforming
the commonplace to the sensational because fornicating with a pig is sensational to
start with. But nonetheless what the remediation entails is a rendering of a greater
degree of currency which operates on the same logic of bracketing. The ‘bracketing’
as an external construction becomes one of many conditions of possibility for the
scandal to initially come about. Ehrat (2011: 9) says that the construction of scandal is
to be understood in its semiotic sense whereby “the scandalicity of scandals is a
meaning surplus value over and above the meaning that regulated the original conduct
and behavior”.