Punish the Jester

I consider myself politically progressive, but there are a few major sticking points that keep me perpetually at odds with my would-be allies. I hold in utter contempt anyone who would attempt to dictate to me a list of things I am forbidden to say, and it is generally more from the left than from other quarters that such dictation comes. I am part of that minority that continues to consider political correctness a real threat, and not a momentary excess of the early 1990s, when we heard all that reactionary huffing about how soon enough they'll be making us say 'vertically challenged' instead of 'short' and so on. I speak not with Rush Limbaugh but with Vladimir Nabokov when I say that I am horrified by the limitation of free expression, by which I don't mean the usual 'expression of unpopular ideas' beloved of 'card-carrying members of the ACLU', but rather the creative use of language where a Schillerian free play of the imagination is the only source of regulation. I believe the desire to regulate externally stems not just from a misunderstanding of how political progress is made, but also of how language functions. 

When I write about this stuff, I know in advance I'm going to get a positive response from free-spirited avuncular types who to be perfectly honest are rather embarrassing to me, those 60-something men in Hawaiian shirts who remember when women liked to be complimented on their 'gams' and who are wary of that stuff they're teaching the kids in the colleges these days; and I know in advance I'm going to get silence from my peers. But what can I do? The principle of parrhesia cannot be grounded on prior calculations about who one would like to hang out with. 

Once I had a phone call from a friend who was attending some soirée at the Mongolian embassy in Washington. "I'm surrounded by Mongols," she shouted. "Be careful," I replied. We laughed. This is not a hilarious joke, not even a joke at all, but if we were to try to figure out what the cause of the laughter was, it would be undeniable that the answer lies in the particular connotative charge of that ethnonym, a charge that is rooted, ultimately, in prejudice and xenophobia. I see images from Tarkovsky of the Mongol invasions of Russia, rude horsemen pouring boiling tar down the throats of devout Christians (incidentally, in the very same film we see the greatest depiction I can think of of the fate of jesters, and the most profound, most quintessentially Russian expression of the essential interwovenness of humor, sorrow, and brutality; see the video clip above). I imagine, moreover, that part of the ineliminable force of the word 'Mongol' arises from the later, and now archaic, accretion of sense that came with the use of the term, with the suffix '-oid' not just as a racial category, but also as a quasi-medical term for people with chromosomal disorders.   

Incidents like this leave me thinking: how much of the mental encyclopedia of culture and history that I've spent the past 40 years acquiring would I have to have scooped out of my head in order for the words I know to stop being polysemous in this way, to lose the charge of potential offensiveness that constrains me to use them with caution, even as I exercise my mastery over them by directing that charge to just the right effect?

If my would-be political allies were being grown up about these things, they would understand that what they are really after is not something that can be attained by setting down, once and for all, the complete index nominum prohibitorum. Rather, it is a matter of cultivating virtues like tact and discretion: virtues for which there are no easy rules to be mastered in an a priori way, but which always depend upon the combination of a million different social cues. 

We are often told that 'it was just a joke' can be no legitimate defense for the person who has publicly transgressed in some way. But the people who say this are interested in accounting principally for transgression or offense. If it were humour, and the nature of joke-telling, that were of principal interest to them, they might be compelled to see that an enunciation's offensiveness does not make it not a joke, and that living one's life under orders from the ironic imagination involves, almost by definition, an unceasing and reckless interest in exploring the boundary between acceptability and what lies beyond it. 

I suppose I'm fine with punishing jesters who fail to read their audience right, who say the wrong thing at the wrong moment and are judged to have said something that was not 'just a joke'. But heavens, let us stop pretending that what they've done is to break an explicit a priori rule. 

Over and over again, we see a flat equivocation in the reaction to failed satire. Recall the child actress who was called a 'cunt'. The satirical newspaper that transgressed in this way is known and praised for imitating the hypocritical, prurient, and reprehensible tone of mainstream and (more recently) social media. But when it misfires with a joke, all of a sudden it is held responsible for the actual content of the claim, it is held to have directly proposed as true the statement that was meant to be a channeling of the sort of thing someone else would say. I refuse to go along with the condemnations. I'd rather endure an occasional misfire than live in a climate where fear of censorious condemnation leads satirists to hold back their satire where it is most needed. 

And let those of us who agree that language can indeed serve as an instrument for maintaining systemic inequality and oppression nonetheless admit that there are genuine competing goods that we have good reason to wish to bring about, and that the elimination of potentially oppressive language might come at the cost of genuinely salutary linguistic tools for the affirmation of solidarity, friendship, or love. Let us admit that there is a vague and unstable boundary between offensive and inoffensive language, that for example in the logic of naming sports teams, or of christening playmates with nicknames, there is always a fine line between mockery and honor. And let us admit that just what it is to be a socially communicating being that enters into significant relationships with other such beings is to negotiate this difficult boundary, sometimes unsuccessfully. 

I like obscene jokes, and I like archaic terms for sex acts and orientations and bodily functions and, yes, for illnesses, faiths, and nationalities too. These are like little linguistic treasures, and I can only suppose that people who have no interest in preserving this patrimony are simply deaf to a certain aesthetic register that is very dear to me. My favorite satire is the kind that comes dangerously close to sounding as though it is earnestly expressing the sentiment it aims to lampoon. I live in fear --real, constant fear-- that leading my life at this register will someday get me into a great deal of trouble. I've seen it happen to good people. I strongly disagree with the assertion, so often made by my progressive friends, that only people who are harboring deep prejudices or who have structural privileges to defend will worry about such a fate. I worry about it because I love language, and I wish to be able to use language to adequately express all the queer things that race through my baroque and densely packed imagination. 

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Comments

[Joseph Hutchison]

First, no 60-something American ever, ever heard the word "gams" in conversation; in a late-night TV movie from the '40s, maybe, but the term was by 1950 a complete anachronism.

Second, I agree with every other point you make—as long as we're clear that a funny obscene joke may get you splashed with a glass of wine at a party and you have no right to whine about it. Deep-sixing political correctness involves risk, as it should. If you don't like risk, don't stray from the social norm. If you stray, expect to be punished. By definition, if you aren't punished you haven't really strayed.

Bottom line: Shock is good for the soul, though by itself is pointless. The obscene joke (you offer no example; I wonder why) may be funny, but if the humor is not revelatory the shock will have low motility. If the shock is potent, the punishment will only make it more so.

[Foppe]

I don't get this piece. You attribute a form of knee-jerk PC-ness to 'progressives', you then mention responses by corporate media as supporting your assertion that knee-jerk PC-ness is something 'progressives' suffer from. Are you under the impression that media hosts and commentators, along with members of the ACLU, should count as meaningfully 'leftist'? Given that almost all of those formulations such as 'vertically challenged' come into being because of (threat of) litigation, shouldn't you be focusing more on being bothered by the fact that legalism rules (your) culture? I see certain parallels with the story told here: http://jacobinmag.com/2013/06/edward-snowden-and-the-american-condition/

[RobertRays]

"First, no 60-something American ever, ever heard the word "gams" in conversation; in a late-night TV movie from the '40s, maybe, but the term was by 1950 a complete anachronism."

Mr. Hutchison, I recall a comic book, ca. 1966, wherein a bad guy getting his butt kicked by Batman actually pauses to notice the run in Batgirl's tights and exclaim, "What gams!" and gets clocked. The term entered my kid's provisional lexicon of Current Adult Expressions.

My wife did not read this comic book but does refer to MY legs as gams. Favorably.

I also feel sure that Robert A. Heinlein must have used it after 1960, certainly after 1950.

[John Quindell]

signsonthequad.blogspot.com

This blog’s about a guy who offended people (in PC central—Seattle) by standing on a campus with a sign reading “I AM NOT GAY.” He also angered people with signs like: “IS THIS SIGN ANTI-SEMITIC?”

His sign “BEAT WOMEN” was especially clever in reminding people they need to read the fine print, and when he had the sign “YOU ARE GOING TO DIE” the police came and threatened to take him to jail.

[Etseq97]

We get it - its all about you. You are a privileged, entitled, upper middle class snot who likes to troll the rest of us with his "politically incorrect" musings about fags and jews, etc. Can we just pay you a bunch of money to shut up??

[Must see Alaska Fly Fishing information]

Great scene. Tarkosvky, one of the few true masters of cinema