“when to say nothing”

“When to Say Nothing”

 

The title of this post refers to my high school friend’s eponymous blog, although he tends to write about very different subjects. I chose this title, however, because I find myself thinking about and/or invoking this phrase on a semi-regular basis these days. In particular, I feel like we are currently living in a time in which too much is being said, all of the time, in all places, to everyone. And yet I’m not ready to propose a solution, so what follows will perhaps just gesture toward some of the points of the debate, namely around freedom of speech/censorship/incitement to violence or provoking words.

 

United States: Nation of Bombastic Immigrants

Exercising verbal discretion has never been a prized trait of the USAmerican citizen: if you think about it, over centuries the nation has been composed of migrants who forcefully elbowed their way to the front of the line, spoke well and charismatically and glibly to get what they needed, and otherwise employed many rhetorical tactics and flourishes to be in this country. (Note: I like taking a somewhat facetious cue from evolutionary psychology and thinking about the evolution of the U.S. nation-state, even if it is sort of tongue-in-cheek.)

 

I’m not entirely dismissive of attempts to theorize the culture of the journey, or the transformative processes by which immigrants become immigrants, and then participants in a new citizen body. I do feel that attempting to get a word in through the din and clamor of our public life has historically been, and continues to be, a central goal of representative ethnic politics…and now it’s transforming into something entirely different as the civil rights struggle gives way to partisan rivalries and weird little splinter groups form, like black and gay Republicans – capitalism seems to slice through the political pie, attempting to make certain identities intelligible but perhaps resulting in more illegibility where it counts.

Brief Background: Theories of the Left/Right Split of the 1950s (Plus Di/Transgression #1: Capitalism/Affirmative Action Rant)

There’s an interesting theory put forth by some people whose names I don’t recall that I remember reading in an undergraduate course called “Politics and American Film.” Helpful reference, I know – but the authors’ argument has stayed with me even during my tedious 6-year trudge through grad school. The argument goes like this: before the 1950s, there existed in the United States a sort of coalition between the middling classes with the radical left (Eugene Debs, the Pullman strikers, and people like the characters in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty), those who would be Communists, European style. However, during the Cold War and anti-Communist scare (not the first one in the U.S. by far), the middle class began to distance itself from the Left, using ethnicity and racial politics partly as a cover for its intensifying conservatism. Hence, the political life in the U.S. began to take a notably centrist turn, which it carries on today, implicitly using civil rights as a sort of screen for an unequal socioeconomic stratification. I don’t entirely buy this, but I do think that often ethnicity and racial identity are often used as attention-getting screens preventing the populace from confronting class hierarchies, which are often claimed not to exist in the U.S. At the same time, racialized groups, like African Americans, are notoriously marginalized in terms of class. Although this is the case, I think that the discourse tends to make the marginalization all about race – and yes, it is often very much about race – and not at all about class. There should be a political economy argument there as well. Until there is one, people will be promoted to positions of leadership based on racial taxonomy with the full knowledge – theirs and everyone else’s – that they have no intention of multiplying the effects. Why would they, in a society that rewards individualistic boot-strapping? To take on inferiors as a charity project, simply because they share the same skin color or through bonds of empathetic affinity, could result in these mentor figures’ lowered productivity, for which they’d be punished. What incentives, therefore, are they given to do this good work after having been promoted? Anyhow, clearly the capitalistic unfolding of affirmative action is one of its most troubling aspects, placing those who have benefited from a combination of their talents and the fact that they comply with a specific identity category in a difficult bind. I am totally in favor of affirmative action, don’t get me wrong. Despite its flaws, I think that it is a much-needed corrective to long-perpetuated sins in the United States. But one person cannot be relied upon to rectify the structural defects of a national system, right? For even one person placed in a position of substantial authority, the systemic race/class nexus is too powerful to be vanquished through, say, acts of grassroots community outreach and mentoring. What is needed is for racism to be acknowledged even as ethnic politics are put in their places and given over to a discussion of class politics, as these are shot through with widespread and institutionalized racism.

 

Digression #2: On the “Ethnic” Arts:

On the subject of ethnic cultural politics: Lately I’ve been hanging out with and translating some of the work of this really excellent Mexican-American playwright who is very interested in questions of the identities and psychic landscapes of migrants to the United States. Although Raúl has been chastised for his subject matter – apparently the lives of Mexican-Americans are considered by Mexican intellectuals too gauche and prosaic to be fitting objects of inquiry, and in the United States, Mexican immigrants, though extremely numerous, are basically invisible, or only sporadically glimpsed as they scramble between various work stations with differing degrees of legitimacy – he insists that the obligation of the artist is to figure/feature a certain community and be concerned with the problematics presented before that community – in other words, not to escape or be somewhere else, creatively speaking or speaking of the space of the mind, but to use art as a means of grounding oneself in the here-and-now and fostering a space for the analysis and processing of events that might otherwise fly by as news tickers and headlines, imbued with just enough novelty and gravitas to disturb our frames of reference but too rapidly for us to ingest on a more profound level.  Take the recent shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, for example: unlike many news stories, this one is receiving somewhat of a more nuanced treatment by editorialists and bloggers asking questions about how mental illness – conceived as a personal affliction – may link to the political debates unfolding in a society (ours) beset by a heated partisan rivalry. There is no question that the far right’s inflated rhetoric, interlarded as it is with paranoia and a sense of almost Manichean necessity to take the structural events of the world into one’s own, pasty/flabby/misanthropic hands, has attracted people who are already fermenting their own brands of crazy – this is, in fact, something that Jim Gilchrist complained about regarding the Minuteman Project, i.e., that in calling for the formation of a border vigilante group, he suddenly found himself surrounded by some serious, should-be-locked-away psychopaths looking to unload their clips into the targets of his cause, and oh, these people were not like him at all, he just being your average, harmless, mouth-foaming racist. Hm.

Anyhow, the point being that my friend Raúl’s sense of what an artist is obligated to do, at least in regard to his own creative output – which output, I should note, evinces a sort of fluctuating realist-absurdist mode, in which emotions are often superficially legible but sometimes the signscape isn’t, or isn’t as immediately accessible as we might initially assume it to be – leads me to ponder the ‘character’ of the USAmerican, in the here-and-now, and how that character has changed given certain circumstances. One of my major issues, which spends a large amount of time propping up my soapbox, is that the United States has everything to do with Mexico, and not just because of the beauty of theorizing the master-slave relationship, or the identity of the subject and its ‘other,’ on the margins, world-turned-upside-down, etc. Yes, people are often defined by that which they push to their farthest outskirts, the marginal, the abject/subaltern, and then which continually returns to haunt them, in the ‘return of the repressed.’ And of course cultures reassert themselves when faced with their unraveling, so that borders exhibit a dynamism practically unheard of anywhere else. The notion of “the border” ties into some integral human psychic formations. But I would hasten to bring into focus the issue of the actual border between the U.S. and Mexico, so that the symmetry and beauty of these border dialectics do not cloud the actual politics of the local context.

In 1848, the United States acquired a substantial portion of its current land holdings – including Texas, California, Colorado, and the Southwest generally – and delineated the U.S.-Mexico borderline at the Río Grande. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and brought about the sale of land from Mexico, intersected with some nationally-defining strands: the national project of Manifest Destiny, for example; the California Gold Rush (essentially, a rebuttal to the naysayers of the westward push, who had in fact been multitudinous); Native American massacres and forced relocations; the slave trade (as many of those who had opposed Manifest Destiny rallied their forces into abolitionist causes, sparking the Civil War); and other events in some way tied to the very crux of the U.S. imaginary. Racism, genocide, self-assertion, settlement, and land-grabbing are all, and have been for a long time, important parts of what constitutes the U.S. citizen – his/her identity traits and sentimental meanderings and apocalyptic fulminations, privatizing privations, prurient prudism, and conservative backwater nostalgia trips. To think that these strands are lessening, loosening, or are in some way non-intrinsic to the U.S. character (or ego-ideal, really) is to essentially miss what went on in our nation for the past, oh, 250-odd years.

And freedom of speech is crucial to the mix. On the face of it, anyone can agree on the importance of fostering a society in which people can speak their minds without fear of persecution. Words are just words, after all, and deeds are what will put you in jail (and in Hell!). Many are the political theorists who have held forth on the ins and outs of ‘freedom of speech,’ the “performatives” (Butler, Rawls, Derrida, Austin) being perhaps the latest wave, or the latest wave of which I am aware. I agree with the performatives, specifically Judy Butler, in her classic work Burning Acts, Injurious Speech, and feel that Butler makes an excellent case in ascribing new force and power to the word (as performative utterance). Rather than limiting herself to a mediating rumination on the texts of our times – as if textual analysis is really the best way to get at ideas about politics, I mean, come on now, really – Butler addresses a Supreme Court case involving a cross-burning by the KKK on a black family’s front lawn and, through her discussion of the conservative and liberal justices’ statements about this act, manages to create a fascinating argument about the ways in which hate speech can or cannot approach criminality, revealing in the process the lengths to which U.S. conservatives will go to hide behind ‘freedom of speech’ as a means of asserting the rights of provocateurs and supremacists of varying sorts. The polemic deserves to be read on its own merits and not paraphrased here, but suffice it to say that I consider this to be a major intervention in scholarly and philosophical considerations of what constitutes free speech and when speech crosses over into action, as well as the ethics of speech.

 

Palin’s Crosshairs: The Violent Tastelessness of Right-Wing Rhetoric

Recent conflagrations, in which people testing injurious speech incite (or, okay, fine, “just happen to coincide with”) actual physical violence, make me long for a new contouring of the U.SAmerican ability to hold forth, a curb on our collective national ability to speak. Perhaps we should all stand at the national mirror, American flag reflected in the background – one hand on the heart, the other holding the tongue. I wonder if it would be possible to inculcate a national “rhetorical mutuality” that would exercise discretion without everyone being legally mandated to do so. Already I think not. Even beyond the idea of political correctness – which is fundamentally flawed, as it only brings forth the impish desire to name that which has been excoriated and expunged from the increasingly anesthetized ‘proper’ speech of the public sphere – I wonder if we could potentially bring into visibility this connection between speech and actions by unleashing a storm of commentary on it, debating the methods and the ways in which speech acts have moral correlates as to physical acts. We do not all refrain from murder simply because it is illegal; neither should the illegality/legality of speech acts prevent us from saying that which we know will provoke an enraged response – speech acts designed to anger and incite rather than stimulate dialogue or move the conversation forward.

The news is always liberally peppered with idiotic questions about the connection between simulated violence – on TV, in video games – and actual violence. I think of these kinds of discussions as a leap directly into the void, or the masturbation of an oil slick, in which you will just get your hands full of slime and possibly never really emerge from the black whorl. A pointless endeavor that amounts to wheel-spinning and countless other clichés. Debating an issue does not always have to mean endlessly feinting or throwing out cues that your audiences will understand because of their well-trammeled familiarity; true debating might actually occur with the introduction of a radically new (and therefore thought-provoking) concept, and the search for these kinds of landmarks and landmines constitutes a lot of philosophical and humanities-oriented research. Anyhow, not to say that this is a new framework, but I want to shed light on the porousness of the public sphere, which endlessly fascinates us, and the ways in which what is not supposed to be said aloud is often said anyway, and is even more powerful for not being authorized. What is not supposed to be said but is said anyway is often the thing that actually rivets the nation, and yet because it is not supposed to be said, we are not allowed to talk about it – at least not in the civil, clipped speech of the public sphere – and ask whence it derives such power. This cycle of censorship, of marginalization of the comments on the margins (or underneath blog posts, or in chat forums) instead of placing them in the center of our national investigations into what is truly absorbing the USAmerican mind and acquiring all of its preoccupations, like a sponge filled with toxins, reduces us to a certain helplessness, in which the ‘high ground’ does not begin to touch at the festering wound off which the ‘low element’ – the far right – gleefully feeds, and from which it gains power. Case in point: Obama chastised the Democrats for being sanctimonious purists in wanting to reject the continuance of the Bush tax cuts. The tax cuts for billonaires suck, but the majority of the nation seems to be in favor of them, and politicians who want to keep their jobs are beholden to the people. In this case, the mass of the people are wrong and gaining power. In other words, wrongheadedness is holding sway. By ignoring this and voting their consciences, are the Democrats helping to reverse the tide? Are they? No. They are only being sanctimonious purists, further ensconcing themselves in their quiet Vermont homes and practicing their peaceable ways while the mob effectively rages outside. Obama, in his venal and self-interested way, was actually heeding/taking note of this mob. It is an important first step to recognize or acknowledge the ways in which power is actually shifting, even if you don’t agree with the orientation of the shift.

 

Has This All Been Said Before?

One thing that becomes noticeable after 29 or so years of life: people will take any opportunity available to come out with some of the worst, vilest ideas and thoughts. In the age of political correctness, they do this under cover of internet anonymity or among groups that they consider like-minded. We are actually seeing a reversal of PC culture, as people just increasingly start adding distasteful smears and provocative flourishes to the public sphere itself – a movement that is skewed rightward. You don’t see liberals calling for members of the oppositional party to be shot, while right-wingers’ language tends to be more violent and overtly racist, note Rachel Maddow and others. And then the release of the Nixon Tapes, for example – in which Nixon goes on an extended paranoiac diatribe against the Jews and Henry Kissinger, that penguin-shaped interloper, roundly agrees – demonstrates the extent of the hate speech, behind closed doors/inadvertently captured on tape/bursting out in public like the explosion of a raw, chapped blister’s contents.

 

Examples of the ways in which inappropriate speech oozes out of the lower and into the upper signscape abound. I will give some quick examples for easy reference:

Example A: Don Imus’s incendiary comment about “nappy-headed hoes.”

Example B: Speech hate groups like the Westboro Church

Example C: the Wiener Circle, Chicago*

 

*Note: I can go on about this, because I have actually experienced this licensed outpouring of hate speech that occurs nightly, needlessly, fruitlessly (and fruitfully for the employees, who make good on copious guilt-tips), but for purposes of expediency I will just direct you to Ira Glass’s televisual segment on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1LPf9mnyU

 

The question is, then, what to do with all of this. We can’t eradicate the thinking of these things in some of the population and, thus, the speaking of them. If we try to shame people into holding their tongues, the irrepressible hate-speech becomes more urgent in its need to exit their bodies and find a recipient or receptacle, occasionally emerging in the most inopportune ways. Yet we cannot condone hate speech or even give it a venue, as it will quickly grow out of control and overflow the constraints, as in the Wiener’s Circle example.

The first step must definitely be to take it seriously, and place it not just in the realm of speech. Speech must be seen as in some way on par with actions – not the same as an action, but an alarming sign nonetheless. Does speech offer a safety valve against harmful action? Here I might say yes, but I think that speech can lead to dangerous actions on the part of listeners. No one would argue against the power and influence that speech and writing can sometimes possess.

 

Is speech more effective an instigator than images of violence? I have no way of knowing or even speculating, so I’ll stay out of that quagmire.

 

To go beyond this for a second and get back to question of art/cultural production: I’m interested in the fact that everyone is continually delivering his/her opinion about every topic and text, regardless of whether he/she is qualified to judge…someone was complaining about this in a magazine that I read recently, framing it as a sort of elitist reaction to the popularization of literary/art criticism through organs like Amazon user ratings, IMDB, Netflix, Yelp, etc – consumer ratings are supposed to make us feel empowered or something, but the democratization of critique doesn’t always work. An extreme example is the market-based proposal for healthcare, in which we patients are supposed to review our options and choose the best one, without possessing a modicum of professional expertise about medical matters. The obvious pitfall here is that 1) as ailing healthcare recipients, our lives are in question, leading us to compound our lack of knowledge with the irrational knowledge of the moribund; and 2) while reason would seem to dictate more tests and diagnostics, we hear frequently now that too much testing is itself a menace.

Anyhow, the author of the article on the excess of popularized ratings systems was bemoaning the death of formal criticism, but I don’t care about that so much as what I see as an informational glut with no alternative but censorship/restriction (which isn’t really a valid option either). These days it seems that everyone is slavering with eagerness to deliver his/her opinion on everything, which leads me to want to write a novel or create an installation focusing on a character who bucks the trend, Bartleby-style, by remaining opaque and unreadable to his/her peers, finding strength in the withholding of information and the retention of a sort of private internal sphere/climate over and against those who would desire his/her opinion on all worldly matters. I am envisioning a character whose very inscrutability contains his/her power, in a way that mingles strands of Taoism (the potential of the uncarved block) with those of Stoicism, for maximum Eastern-Western fusion buffet.

 

I say all of this as one embedded in what I’m calling an ‘information competition industry’ (ICI), in which the sharing of information and opinions is what defines the discipline and sets the successful candidate apart from the failed competitor (unclear sharing, non-novel information, uninteresting interventions)…in light of that, the character who would refuse to share his/her information and inner thoughts, despite the need to do so and the screaming public demanding it, attains a new sort of heroism, that of the unreadable blank space.

 

And of course I recognize the irony in writing such a great deal on the need to not write so much. But in a way, I’m exercising my national cultural rights, and perhaps cartoonishly so. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m very much the ideal of the U.S. citizen: child of immigrants who built themselves up through a family-owned, multi-generational plumbing company, wanting nothing flashy – just a house in the Midwest and some kids through college. And even when it became more complicated than that, we retained a sense of our middling-class status (totally unsustained, I’d say, by this point, after our ivy league educations and entrepreneurial spirit, plus the inbuilt privileges of whiteness and general phenotypic desirability that got us in the doors of the ‘Big Houses’ of the New World). Anyhow, you know the story, because it’s the classic story – a fantasy, really, blowing into the desert winds of our direst longings…

So here I’ll stop. Perhaps I’ve laid out some rationales for ‘saying nothing,’ and my long-winded treatise might hopefully enlighten you a little bit about the peripheries of many topics, while not giving you a comprehensive knowledge of any one…but I think I’ve said enough. Following Lauren Berlant’s forthcoming book (Cruel Optimism) on the new ‘ambient citizenship’ exercised in a public sphere of audition (as in listening), lurking, passively spying, and quietly scavenging amongst the ruins of the American Dream, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Talk back!

-k