i was glancing through the Times Literary Supplement when I saw a commentary that basically laid out Cancel Culture as bitched about by fans of Prince Harry and fans of the Traditional Experience. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were accused of being denizens of Cancel Culture, attempting to cancel the monarchy be saying it didn't matter anymore to them. That anyway seemed to be the way the Dons and Doyens we Yanks imagine wandering through the House of Lords. The Joe Strummer wannabe's found the bitching about the Sussexes be tossed in the maw of the great Kraken of Tory Cancel Culture...
My own thought is that Cancel Culture is a way for Right Wing twits to bitch about encroaching realities. Might be working against them -- when was the last time anyone mentioned Ayn Rand in normal conversation. Encroaching reality might be doing us a favor if it keeps forcing these folks into a smaller and smaller corner.
However, through no real fault of the universe, I was presented with a couple of articles that addressed in different ways the actual role of Cancel Culture...one that has been around for a long time, since literacy and probably before that.
The morning began with a tag from Downeaster Jeff Thompson, who is one of the more genuine and grounded of the former blogger occasionally stepping out but usually hanging out dropping logic and decency bombs in the role Facebook Malcontent Primo. Jeff was posting an article by Jacob Bacharach, a NGO manager probably because of the hours, a novelist and essayist of some merit, and most germane, a blogger that would get Swift to come down from heaven or up from hell to make an appearance. This was an appearance not of IOZ but of Jake, but it was absolutely great.
The article appeared in The New Republic, to which I have now subscribed. What the hell, just something else I will probably not read all that much. The GEN X Cancel Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up is well written and is worth reading just as an exercise in criticism. It also has some excellent points. I could fill a longer article than Crispin wants me to with just pieces of the work. This is one example that made me understand a bit...
There is also something regressive and a bit adolescent about this sort of thinking, as though all the cancel culture complainers long for are evenings at the debate club and late-night rap sessions full of grand philosophical gestures and free from the grotty pressures of real life. It may be why so many cancel culture critics are fixated on the college campuses they themselves have long since left. The concession and compromises of adulthood are rarely as fun or as heroic as the caffeinated debates of their youth, when they could say and do almost anything, parked in a beanbag chair in a red-brick dorm.These thinkers are unwilling or unable to grasp that debate alone cannot resolve many of the problems we face—climate, inequality, poverty, disease. They are not mere exercises. They are material and real, and they are immune to cleverness and outrageousness. They require solidarity and collective action as much as they require argument...
One of the other things that I read in passing usually is AEON which is a bit more intellectual and usually has an article about some philosophical issue, another about some aspect of social science or it's intersection with SCIENCE, which can be interesting as well as scary at times. Recently, Aeon began adding articles from PSYCHE which is oriented toward looking at just about anything from a psychological point of view -- scientific, social science, speculatory, historical or philosophical.
This article dealt with the forbidden books and texts that are starting to come out the woodwork of academe.
here's what people mean when they start howling that we're in a post-truth era, reality is melting, etc. people like us (='the elites') have lost epistemic control over the peasants' minds. well they never had it, really, but they definitely believe that they should have control over what you believe. why it's a crisis now is because some of the people whose minds they've lost control of are now exercising political power. it's your little academic/bureaucratic/technocratic world, extreme in its self-love. the question of how to fix it, stop the conspiracy theories, quiet kellyanne down, etc is the same question as the question of how we can can reassert control over your beliefs and hence your behavior. well, it's going to be all 'gatekeepers': censorship, silencing of views divergent to whatever we seem to believe at the moment. 'what can we do about post-truth?' = 'how can we silence our opponents?' one of the most breathtaking things about the whole approach is that, though nothing could be more obvious than what they're doing and why, they have no idea about themselves that they are the sort of people who want to silence and disqualify people.
cokie roberts on morning joe, saying what everyone is saying [play trump soundbite]: that is not funny! that is bullying! to think that bullying could be elected pres (i think that's exactly how she formulated it). there are many charges you could bring against human beings, 'bully' is one of the milder ones. and it is being generalized willy-nilly, so i can bully a whole nation by standing at a podium talking to a camera (while people cheer), blogging etc. we have come a long way from the bully pulpit.
for example, i am not at all signing off on the recent american philosophical association statement on bullying.. everything has been vague; i think it arises from george yancy's "dear white america" in the nyt and the brutality of the comments. let's say i have done a lot of this for a long time. my view is that i cannot be bullied in the comments section of anything anywhere (though i am a white guy, so..). i got email death threats after i said the beatles sucked, after an abortion column, and so on. after i wrote a column saying i let my 13-year-stepson play grand theft auto (and played it with him), people who said they were lawyers said they were instituting proceedings to remove my children from my custody, which was the worst kind of horseshit. true the abortion one made me a bit jittery; it was just a flat threat, then my address. but calling that bullying seems to underplay it. i did not contact the authorities. maybe i should have whined to the apa; protect me, fellow geeks! will you take a bullet for me?
here's why they're keeping it vague: if they told us what not to say, or even what they are in fact objecting to, they would have to violate their own ban, or object to themselves. in other words, the ban is literally logically impossible. you'd think this would occur to philosophers, but of course, notoriously, philosophy professors struggle on their best days with basic logical concepts. also they live in quaking fear of the supernatural power of phonemes. they are what they think the followers of donald trump are.
it's because american k-12 education has been on an unbelievably repetitive yet singularly well-funded anti-bullying campaign for a long time; you probably think schoolchildren should be standardized-tested on an antibullying curriculum. not gonna solve your little problem, sister. by these means the word 'bullying' has gained a preternatural power: it's a thin and forgotten line between bullying and assault and murder. i just actually hear the charge as trivial, although you could have a bad kindergarten situation, i acknowledge. but every single thing the academic left (=absolutely everyone, i mean to the tune of 98%) is doing to free anyone, they twist into speech prohibitions, which i believe flamboyantly displays their totalitarian hearts and total inability to reflect on the coherence of their own belief set, as well as a stunning lack of self-reflection and honesty in public space, as well as the iq that has so richly justified their categorization as 'special needs' or 'differently abled.' they are straight-up words-that-begin-with-p. they don't know who they are.
let me ask you this, philosophy professor: when i designated you as 'special needs', did you hear that as an insult? or was it ok? why? i thought you said that one was ok! whatever i may have been thinking at that moment, i did not call you a 'cretin,' an 'idiot,' or a 'retard,' or any of the other superseded euphemisms primitive people such as yourselves thought would cure us all. i really did not. i see you as part of the special needs population, however, and i think that is obviously the right track for you; but on your own account i cannot possibly have criticized or offended you by saying that. i propose to say it all day and see how you like it.
if you've got anything, which - reading your stuff - appears to me extremely unlikely, you could come back at me; that's sort of part of this philosophy thing, or it once was. hit me in the comments as hard as you please. please? this euphemism-as-homeopathic cure thing is not going to work out. carefully ponder the possible uses of the phrase 'the n-word' as an epithet in the sort of facebook bullying that might have you cowering under your bed or hanging yourself because of your self-esteem issues. indeed, on frege's account, 'the n-word' refers to the sense of the term 'nigger,' which is certainly offensive. they are connected in a meta-referential stack that preserves offense by stipulation. if one is offensive, so is the other. i'd suggest introducing a euphemism for 'the n-word,' such as 'the t-phrase.' that might buy you a couple of months, anyway.
and i don't think you've thoroughly considered the possibility of offensive numbers, you 771. that there is an amazing new indexical slur i've devised, to encompass your race, your gender, your family, and whatever else may be bundled into your inmost identity. definitely your super-gross yet pure-vanilla sexuality. i think it'll catch on, making mathematics impossible (for you, anyway. i know that stuff was hard for you, so no loss. people have different strengths!) in a secret ceremony, i have bequeathed on '771' an offensive power that rises from it as healing arises from the relics of the saints. you are helpless (well, you are helpless whether 771 is around or not). maybe therapy will bring some racial healing for all 771s?? right, '771' doesn't seem to have the right historical connection to systematic oppression. don't worry, it will. there have actually literally been offensive numbers. check your talmud on that, or we might find it near the heart of any belief system. or it's a little hard to tell whether there have been offensive numbers. i guess first we'd have to figure out what the hell a number is.
perhaps (sucks on pipe; make that vape) if we referred to autism as a super-power...see how the world is not made by the way we talk? i did this to richard rorty, year after year, in his office; "dick" (i said) "oh, dick. the world is made of language [or however he formulated it that year]. right, we both know that's false. you don't believe it yourself, of course. then i'd march him right down the history of euphemisms - i mean the oed etymologies etc - in various dimensions. that was one of 1700 decisive counter-examples. he was immune to rationality; all he did was shrug. but at least he shrugged intelligently. still i'm holding him posthumously responsible for this breathtaking blunder y'all take as a commonplace. let me refer you to my book...oh, never mind.
on the other hand, i highly approve of that other classic dick schtick: truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying, and suchlike. well you are letting me get away with saying everything i'm saying until you prove me wrong in my face. i don't seem to have that little tri-dot thing on my keyboard, but anyway, the only rational conclusion i can draw is that, therefore, what i'm saying is true. this will go for raw correspondence theories as well, though i admit that you could do better with coherence. except that is ridiculous.
as the membership of the apa yapyaps emptily, kind of mumbling the same euphemisms together, they pause for a parenthetical 'words are powerful.' not your flaccid quasi-words, b. also the 'i just got victimized in the comments section' approach just shows you as kind of pathetic. how did your daddy tell you to deal with a bully? alright many a fuckwad could intimidate me physically; but i feel i have the best insult-generator in the world, and if i decide to launch instead of just grinning and forgetting about it 3 seconds later (which is my usual approach), you will know what bullying is. or you won't even understand how badly i just ridiculed you, how bad i just made you look.
if it were logically possible for you to provide me with a list of banned racial slurs, i'd take a look at it, then propose to provide you with 37 new ones. you will know exactly what they mean. ban those, and i will increase geometrically from there. this language thing is copious. chomsky: infinite possibilities from a finite vocabulary + a syntax. you really need to take out language entirely. well, that thing is offensive, the source of all our real problems. very inappropriate. taboo. it will be a relief when you fall silent, i admit. you were not saying anything anyway. this is beginning to look bad for our colleagues in literature and mathematics, though. what do their associations say?
and i'm sorry, you're going to have to provide me with a specific, exhaustive list of all the terms i am not permitted to use, and all the juxtapositions of acceptable words i am not permitted to assay. obviously i have no basic intuition on that. that is some vague-ass shit you've got in that statement.
i don't think you want to do a damn thing about racism, sexism, homophobia or any of the other dozens of dimensions of oppression you've obsessively enumerated and taxonomized. i think you want to live in a world where we all play 'let's pretend.' that is how we got where we are now: no progress since king, at best. a society where hardly anyone sounds like a racist or believes themselves to be a racist, but which is structurally racist in every dimension. i blame people like you for that. please, you're not also pushing 'it's time for a frank national conversation?' you are not sincere or reflective persons, and your unanimity alldayeveryday on everything is slavish, a devastating indictment of your inmost selfhood. deep inside, you must feel your personal redundancy, yes? the fact that you yourself are making no contribution whatever, that if you did not exist, everything would just go on as before. you are as subject to peer pressure as nancy reagan thought elementary-age children were: a flock, a herd, a hive in which each individual is subsumed in a collective consciousness. unlike theirs, though, your collective consciousness is a delusion you seek to enforce on everybody with overwhelming peer pressure. that's what you mean when you condemn individualism and say 'but what about the collective?' i don't know, are you talking about that collective? i have withdrawn consciously, and i am perfectly satisfied with my decision. or, this is my contribution to the collective. swallow it.
i think you should think back and see whether you can remember the moment or process when you sold yourself, betrayed yourself; maybe it was everything from high school to tenure, a million tiny incremental compromises, a million acts of treason to yourself. then i want you to try to remember another moment: the moment you stopped noticing that you had no soul, when you stopped experiencing the hole where your soul used to be. there will be no going back. you know that more clearly than i do, for you know it deep inside. now that you know where you are, what did it all mean? what did you actually get in exchange? i'll tell you this, it compromised your work from the start to whatever you're working on now. it isn't your work.
this seems trivial after that: you have betrayed philosophy. a whole generation that means next to nothing, or every member of which sounds the same, but some of whom do have tenure. congratulations. there would be no place for the great figures of our own tradition in the american philosophical association. they held fiercely to their own vision. now you understand the price they paid, and the beauty of what they achieved. what you have done to yourselves and one another and to wisdom: that is cowardice, in its most thorough human form. maybe cowardice can be the theme of your next book, for that is what you really know best and closest up, something you can fully know by incorrigible introspection, something that is immediately present to consciousness, perfectly clear and distinct at last. a foundation.
on their own account, the statement is intended to create a safe atmosphere so that philosophers can feel free to write op-ed columns. i'll tell you what: if you are hesitating to write that column because of what the comments might look like, i do not want to read your pablum. i am going to straight-up claim credibility on this: of all the philosophy professors in america, i believe i have written exponentially the most op-ed columns. however, i haven't belonged to the apa in a very long time.
philosophy professors! hear my threat. if you publish op-ed columns, i am going troll from one to the next, effortlessly intimidating you one by one and leaving you quivering like yucky piles of semi-congealed knox-brand premium gelatin(tm). i'll time it for just when you have to go give that lecture in your ethics class. i'm going to do it while i sit right here in my living room, amusing myself immensely. oh dang i should have thought of that years ago. maybe eventually i could be the only voice left! i'll see you next month at the pacific apa in frisco. i'll have a name-tag on. i'ma straight-up take your lunch money and do your mom. (i did your dad [again] last night.)
this is where i hop off the midnight train to auschwitz. have a nice trip! headin to georgia.
shit! emory is down there. and that song was so perfect. siri! which direction is most clear of forced-labor camps? [a: "you are surrounded."]
somehow the united states went from 'congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press' to “There are a lot of names and descriptions that were used over time that are inappropriate today,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said. “And I think the name this is attributed to the Washington football club is one of those.” in other words, we used to value a bold brawling discourse; now our speech is run by little schoolmarms: 'inappropriate!' honestly, that something is inappropriate, other things being equal, recommends it. i suppose 'appropriateness' is the constitutional standard on prior censorship of expression in our jurisprudence?
this duck dynasty thing is ridiculous. neither phil nor anyone else should permit the mind-numbing second golden age of pc to keep them from saying whatever they please. one 'offensive' bit: he compared the anus unfavorably to the vagina as a sex organ. now, that is some funny stuff, and a question that in some form or some occasions is liable to face us all, as it were. indeed, it is a or perhaps the fundamental human dilemma. i wonder how the polling looks on that these days.
but look: you've got these redneck reality shows. i like them too. but the basic premise of course is: look at these crazy hicks! there are wild people like this in our own country! it has, if you'll permit me to say so, a bit of a minstrel-show quality, and condesenscion is one of the elements of the entertainment. so now you are going to penalize the guy for talking like a (highly witty) redneck? you are? you hired him to be precisely this, and now you're suspending him for it? people: i'm trying to figure out whether to think of you as vaginas or as anuses.
as you know the main instrument of women's oppression is the word 'bitch'. it makes me open my mouth in an o and touch the flat four fingers of my tiny right hand to it in apparent shock. i deeply admire the sort of feminist who fears and loathes phonemes, and attributes patriarchal oppression to them. christ, at least they're not holding me responsible for my actual misogyny, which is a big relief, because it's been a struggle. what people don't understand - even though everyone says it all the time and even though it could not more obviously be false - is that words create reality. why are so many women struggling in poverty, sexual exploitation, abusive relationships? the root cause is 'bitch'. i do think it works particularly well applied by men to men, however. at any rate, to avoid saying or writing 'bitch', i refer to it as 'the bitch word'.
lily allen must be banned, because she's using intrinsically bad-for-women sounds.
if that means we must leave the grotesque idiocy and exploitation of hip hop and r&b videos without a response or critique, then so be it. we're too scared of the words to be able to respond at all. now you might think that it takes a bit of courage to do what lily alen did: it's like, faced with an actually oppressive musical world, she stood up to fight. you might think that, if lily allen were properly scared and intimidated by the word 'bitch' and couldn't use it at all, she would be frozen in capitulation in a world she despises. but at least she wouldn't be impolite. the coincidence of magic-of-words feminism with, say, the etiquette of the bourgeoisie circa 1956, is remarkable, and of course speaks to the origin of this sort of feminism. it's going to be amazingly difficult to eradicate the bitch word, of course. we need a sort of logocide that does to words what round-up does to weeds.
alright let me come off my conceit (which i sustained a bit too long. sorry). this whole thing goes for images too. consider, for example, leni riefenstahl's triumph of the will. it was intended to glorify the nazi regime. those images, though, are central in almost every visual presentation of nazism: they don't come pre-interpreted, and now we look with a horrified amazement. those same evil images help us understand, if nothing else, how the nazis wanted to present themselves. if you repressed those images, say under your austrian anti-nazi-propaganda laws, you're just depriving yourself of understanding, achieving a willful blindness. i think that makes the rise of neo-nazism more, not less likely.
now, lily allen's feminism on body image etc is well-(and extremely pointedly)expressed in that song, but it is pretty predictable. what is most interesting is the likewise-pointed critique of the way black women's bodies are depicted, for example, in music videos. now, that there is a bold and questionable move for a white artist. but if you think the nature of the images themselves is inherently exploitative, you really don't understand the way images work. lily has to be able to do that. we have to be able to watch it. and so, i say, the male r&b artist who produces the sort of images that allen is parodying has to be allowed to do it too, because there is no way to distinguish them by the nature of the images themselves. indeed, lily could have made almost as good a video by using actual clips from the sort of thing she is attacking, right? so if those images were repressed, lily's critique would be repressed too. the whole transaction of repression and silence, whether performed by an active censorship regime backed by force or by extreme social sanctions, if you ask me, leaves the culture untransformed or freezes it in place.
but the free circulation of images and words cuts in all sorts of dirrections, makes possible all sorts of critiques, parodies, ridicule, rejection, appropriation, redeployment. see, that video uses the oppressor's own images as a weapon to attack him. in the realm of images and words, that is the most effective weapon, the weapon actually most dangerous to the oppressive use of images etc: she shows you what these images actually mean. but you cannot do that if the images themselves are verboten. they use those images to lie. she uses them to comnfront us with the truth about our culture. this is absolutely typical, with both words and images, and you cannot tell who is going to make what creative re-interpretation. the last thing you want to do is make that impossible in a regime that silences or blinds people.
so the right response to that barrage on bet that so harms our daughters and so on, is not to shut down '106 and park', but to make videos like lily allen makes them. i showed that video to jane last night. and here's why: lily allen makes girls aware of what they're really watching, arms them with knowledge that they need to negotiate this world, gives them a new kind of critical distance, with a good beat. jane was absorbed by it.
now how serious is our situation, really? well thank god for youtube right now, and anything that displays lax enforcement of copyright law. obviously, you will not be seeing anything like that video (i mean the actual video, the words and images as she produced them) on television, which is insanely ironic. not on the radio. i would like to adapt this thing i'm writing right now into a column and pitch it, say, to the new york times. but my column about this in the times would be a complete enactment of mindless, pointless hypocrisy. i couldn't tell you what words i'm talking about. i couldn't link to the video i was writing about. i'd compose an absurd structure of euphemisms, evasions, and jive. i'd have to observe precisely the taboos i'm trying to expose as superstitious nonsense. go to a public school classroom and see if you can pull that thing up on one of the computers. no, extremely safe search is extremely on, like it is in china. by and large, we are trying to protect our daughters from lily allen's message, correct? we are repressing that mesage. not entirely, of course, and what we should do is watch for further encroachments while drawing attention to the braying asininity of basic media unfreedoms we all take for granted.
what sort of woman do i want my daughter to turn out to be? actually, i want her to be whatever she wants to be. but if i were saying, i'd say i want her to be a woman like lily allen: a woman with the guts and the vocabulary to say exactly what she means and to represent herself with truth, and to express that in whatever way seems most effective, most amusing, most creative, or most real.
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