(This is the fourth installment in a A Foundering Conversation (here are links to Part I , Part II , Part III) which itself followed upon the (single) installment of A Simulating Conversation.)
*
Adam: That’s your cue, Ursula.
Ursula: If I may, kids. In Freud’s case, to answer Emilia’s question, these cast-off things, these negligibles, aren’t – well they aren’t just – the feces of the anal stage in psychic development. That’s a feature of his account of childhood libido, yes, but this is a much bigger issue. His point is that these moments that seem completely superfluous are in fact potentially the key to what makes us what we are. Because they are indications of what we do despite our stated intentions. On Freud’s account, our every interaction is a transmission of either flowing or blocked libido – no not just sex, but desire – desire and its satiation, its frustration, or indeed its overflow; this is simply the defining characteristic of what it is to be a psyche like we are.
Iachimo: I’m gonna say it – Ursula you know this – this makes me crazy. This analysis of slips of the tongue and so on. Because once you open this door to claiming that people can be held as saying things they don’t mean to say, things they expressly deny saying, on the basis that something they do can be, what, “read as meaning” that, you effectively license anything. It’s nothing but convenience –
Adam: Hmmm, Iachimo, interesting you should say that. “Makes you crazy,” you say …
Iachimo: Ha, ha.
Ursula: My dear, first of all, Freud doesn’t hold that anything and everything can be deduced from this. It isn’t quite like, Adam what’s the principle – ?
Adam: Ex falso quodlibet. Roughly, “from a contradiction, anything follows.” It’s a maxim of medieval syllogistic logic. Which by the way, I too deny. Or rather –
Orsino: I think you once said “Yes but they say this like it’s a bad thing.”
Adam: Yes that sounds like me.
Ursula: As with Emilia’s art, which as she’s been at pains to insist is not at all an anything-goes affair, there are principles of what counts as a legitimate interpretation. They are however, not so easy to press into formulae –
Iachimo: Also very convenient.
Adam: Also, not true! Lacan has formulae galore – mathematical (well, pseudo-mathematical) formule –
Ursula: Adam, someday when you want to read Lacan, let me know. Truly. You bring the pleasure principle and I’ll bring the death drive. Until then, I have to do the work of two, so please.
Juliet: Now I can’t even tell what’s a joke.
Orsino: Now you’re catching on.
Ursula: Lacan – and Zizek even more, by the way – observes how, as I was saying, the Law produces an inevitable pushback – not an “equal and opposite reaction,” or some such; the Law – not any particular legal measure or system, but “The Law” writ large – permits as it were its own transgression, but note, not in a way of a regrettable flaw, or “allowing for imprecision,” or even necessary venting of social frustration; rather, this is a feature of the Law as such.
Adam: But this really is – it’s just Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics – justice finally transpires to be, well, epieikeia; I mean, it’s complex – sorry, but it is – and I should say, Ursula, of course I recognize the same would be said of Lacan, and yes, I’ll read – well go ahead and choose something. From Ecrits, or –
Ursula: No, it’s obviously got to be Seminar Seven.
Orsino: OK, I have to ask – why obviously?
Ursula: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Is the title.
Adam: – but let me just say, epieikeia, it’s – well it’s a kind of moderation in applying the law. And it’s not formulatable as a known-in-advance principle. It’s contextual.
Iachimo: Mm-hmm. And in any given case, can you say why you are doing what you’re doing? Can you say how the context impacts the application? Because if yes, you can back up a level to a principle. And if not, you don’t really know, and –
Adam: It’s a kind of knowing how to apply a principle. That doesn’t make it stateable as a meta-principle.
Iachimo: Yeah it sounds to me like it’s just a word for blundering ahead.
Adam: Iachimo, someday when you want to read Aristotle –
Iachimo: Although, wait – maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s engineering. Like you said earlier, Orsino.
Emilia: Or art.
Iachimo: Sorry – go on, Ursula. I need to think.
Ursula: To answer Juliet’s question –
Emilia: Juliet can you say your question again?
Juliet: I think Ursula was trying to explain to me why this banter is y’all’s love language.
Ursula: And why it is that permits the seriousness of the conversation to transpire. Between us, there are – let’s say, disputes. I think Adam is nostalgically fixated on the past in shall we say interesting ways; Adam thinks I am painted into a self-refuting corner with too much hermeneutic of suspicion. Poor Iachimo thinks we are all whistling past the graveyard in which Roco’s Basilisk has already laid our graves –
Iachimo: You think it’s funny. Also, no, I don’t.
Ursula: I think it’s fascinating, and I do believe it too is symptomatic – I don’t mean you, Iachimo, I mean what you’re working on, the whole field. Emilia can’t quite take all of us seriously –
Emilia: I do!
Ursula: – except of course that she puts her energy into her art and into her political work and she wants people to talk with about both of these, and also she is full of love. Probably she and Orsino have the least difficulty with any of the rest of us. Orsino fled one doctrinaire environment –
Orsino: More than one.
Ursula: – and enjoys all the triangulating, all the while posing as straight man to Iachimo’s comic. Orsino will turn out to be a spy.
Orsino: Code name, Raven. What’s the password?
Iachimo: Four-and-twenty blackbirds.
Orsino: You may pass.
Ursula: But the disagreements are real. We argue because –
Adam: Because you’re almost right but not.
Ursula: – well, I happen to think it hasn’t got much to do with being right or wrong; it’s because this is where the jouissance is.
Adam: Which is why you are wrong! But also, almost not.
Iachimo: I think – I think I keep talking to you all because you listen. I still hold out hope of convincing you. But –
Emilia: But you have colleagues in the department, at the lab. You could talk to them, and not have to explain so much either.
Iachimo: No, you’re right. It’s also because the kinds of objections I get here are different.
Ursula: But I think that none of this would work, without – or no that’s not quite right, it’s not that it almost works and if you add humor then it works – rather, in and by working, there is a tension that build up and needs releasing – or rather, again –
Juliet: I don’t know. Sometimes it looks like – I mean, I just got here. And if I were doing a training this is not how I would put it –
Adam: Thank yo for that, at any rate.
Juliet: – but sometimes it looks like you don’t really go to the heart of the disagreements. It might be more that you disagree in order to joke, than that you joke in order to disagree.
Ursula: I like this, at first pass.
Juliet: And can I just say, I mean yes there are all kinds of ways in which disagreement is hard, and yeah it can turn into fights and sometimes those fights are not worth it – but. But there are times you have to fight. I mean, I’m not going to have just a respectful difference of opinion with some transphobe, right, who’s clearly baiting me. I might have to step away, be kind to myself, but there’s not some principled agree-to-disagree neutral ground here. It’s like, what this quote says by Robert Jones Jr, it’s something like, “We can disagree and still get along, but not if your disagreement involves my oppression or denies my humanity or my right to exist.”
Emilia: Who’s Robert Jones Jr?
Orsino: He’s an author. That quote sometimes gets attributed to James Baldwin because for a long time his handle was “Son of Baldwin.” And can I just say? It’s nowhere near as good as anything Baldwin would have said.
Adam: I’m glad you said it.
Orsino: I mean, just in terms of language. The sentiment is – fine, I guess? In the abstract. Maybe Baldwin would have said something along the same lines. And he might be right, but this “denial of my right to exist,” or whatever – this is a really problematic formulation.
Juliet: Why? I don’t understand. If someone pretends they’re “just asking questions,” or whatever, when their bottom line is that Black people, or queer people, or people who are unhoused, should just suck it up, or ideally go away –
Orsino: It’s a problem because this “denial” of someone’s “right to exist,” unless it’s explicit, is really in the eye of the beholder. I can get huffy and indignant because you said, what, maybe that Black conservatives – which I don’t really think I am, and I’m not claiming this is your position, to be clear – are Uncle Toms, but even something as egregious as this doesn’t mean you want them all forcibly re-educated, right? And rhetoric that argues that this is what it means, that we’re all headed to Woke Sensitivity Training Camps forever or something, just pours gasoline on a fire. It’s needlessly provocative. If you tell me I’ve “denied your right to exist,” or contradicted your basic humanity – I have to say, that’s a very high bar.
Juliet: But – first, there really are people who say one thing publicly and another, more vicious thing, privately, with these little dogwhistles for people who understand, who are listening for the signals. And second – it’s not. It’s not a high bar, it’s not just a matter of opinion. If someone who experiences oppression tells me about their experience, I believe them. Without question. And there are things you can say that just do mean that people ought to get out of the way, and the practical upshot of this is that people get harmed, and people die.
Adam: So you’re saying that the height of the bar is – something of an optical illusion.
Juliet: That people know on some level is false and keep buying into anyway. Sometimes on purpose.
Ursula: Well, this practicality, this de facto upshot, is important – I mean not just the upshot but the de facto. You might say, Juliet, that with jokes – as in other kinds of parataxis, or other forms of slippage of meaning too – euphemism, irony, all the ways we avoid by not quite avoiding – there’s a kind of, what you were saying was the case with liberalism. Wanting it both ways.
Emilia: But don’t people say things they don’t really mean all the time? Or else – things they mean but not so much? Exaggeration. It’s a way of, what, blowing off steam.
Juliet: I don’t think of sexist jokes as blowing off steam. I don’t think of dogwhistles as blowing off steam. They perpetuate – and they’re meant to perpetuate –
Emilia: No, wait. I know, people say they perpetuate toxic masculinity, whatever. I don’t think that’s false exactly. I think it’s true. Or – it can be true. But I also think that you are doing a lot of blaming the smoke for the fire, if you see what I mean.
Juliet: If I’m doing a training at a workplace, and some male there makes a sexist joke – or I hear about one – I treat that as the symptom of something underlying. And you know what? Everyone says, “Oh I was joking.” They get this taken-aback look, “What?? Don’t be so sensitive.” And it isn’t harmless. Jokes aren’t even remotely harmless. But I don’t go pour water on the joke. And I don’t think I’m pouring gasoline either.
Ursula: No – I wouldn’t say harmless either, in fact.
Adam: Perhaps you could pour some XYZ.
Juliet: Look, that’s what I mean. Why is something funny? If the answer is – and it is, a lot of the time it is – basically, “because the joke is on them,” “about them,” “those people,” then I want to know – why does that make it funny? I want to know, does “them” mean people with more power, or less?
Iachimo: Punching up, or down.
Adam: Is it always about power, then? Is a joke – hitting someone? It’s violence?
Juliet: “Try some XYZ”. Look, that’s clearly meant to both talk over people’s heads with a kind of nudge-wink, in-crowd, we-get-it-don’t-we energy, and it’s also meant as a demeaning slight towards the whole idea of DEI, the work that I do. Don’t think I don’t pick up on it, I’ve met too many employees who are resentful of having to do another one of these stupid trainings, isn’t it enough that we all try to get along? And what’s more, you have this plausible deniability, which is the whole point of the joke in the first place.
Orsino: What’s wrong, exactly, with trying to get along?
Juliet: What’s wrong is that it’s not cost-free, and the costs aren't borne equally. It costs people. It costs people putting up with shit, with sexism, with passive-aggressiveness, with microaggressions, over and over and over – and they always have to, certain people always have to play nice or else they’re the ones who are ruining the party or whatever. Kind of like I’m doing right now. Sorry Emilia.
Emilia: It’s – well I don’t want to say OK when it clearly isn’t – but I’m not mad.
Adam: So – Ah – I presumed that you were by now in on the H2O / XYZ joke – insofar as it is a joke, I don’t suppose it is all that funny – and I don’t think I’ve dissimulated regarding my estimation of DEI work, either – in any case, I apologize. In fact I truly had no intention of –
Juliet: Didn’t you though? Because “apologize” is another one of those words people say a lot. Is it a step in actually making repair? Or does it just mean, Stop making me feel bad, when they have no idea what they did, and no interest at all in understanding what the impact of their action was? No interest at all in doing the work to get better at it. “Apology” is not some get out of jail free card –
Iachimo: That’s an interesting figure of speech. Sort of carceral, wouldn’t you say?
Ursula: You’ll make a psychoanalyst of you yet, Iachimo.
Juliet: What I’m saying is, people say “I apologize” and it just means “Shut up.” And I’m saying we should say what we mean, because this whole game of hint-hint doublespeak and doublethink – here’s some Orwell for you – serves power. It matters what we say, what words we use for things. We say “collateral damage” in a war and we’re talking about kids being crushed in blown-up hospitals, we say “boys will be boys” to describe rape culture.
Adam: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Juliet: Whatever.
Adam: Precisely.
Juliet: And then you throw religion in – “God’s work”, and it turns out, we say “love,” and it means conversion therapy. Did you know – one cop who shot a black kid, in “self defense” of course – an unarmed kid, does it even need to be added – said this boy was a demon? We need to call things what they are. Because when we don’t –
Orsino: I know the case you mean. It was Michael Brown, shot in Ferguson Missouri. And for the record, the officer, who by the way was investigated twice, said that Brown “looked like a demon.” I read the whole transcript.
Ursula: And you are outing yourself as actually having a rather keen memory.
Orsino: I take notes.
Emilia: We’ve observed.
Juliet: Oh, “looked like,” well that's OK then. My God –
Adam: I do remember the case Orsino means, and it might seem a slender point, but I think it is true that “looks like” is not the same as “is.” More broadly, it seems to me curious how some of your points are euphemisms – collateral damage, etc. – and some are exaggerations.
Juliet: You’re – what does that even matter – ? –
Adam: I’m asking – as were you, I took it – for a little care in how we speak. If we attribute to our opponents worse arguments and worse stances than are really theirs, we will be unprepared to meet them in their strength. Moreover, it is not merely needlessly provocative, as Orsino observes, it actually gives them a weapon, when we misconstrue them –
Juliet: I don’t think I’m misconstruing them at all. I think it’s absolutely clear that the police regard black and brown bodies as a threat, that landlords and businesses see homeless encampments as a threat, that cis and hetero people see queer and trans people as a threat. Talk to Evangelicals out there, they will say it is literally demonic. What kind of “strength” do you have in mind, if you mean something that’s more than police power and bullying –?
Orsino: Can I just say – and I’m going to put this as straightforwardly as I can and still be diplomatic: as one of those black and brown bodies out there, I object. I object to being made into a talking point. In someone’s agenda. Especially parties who are keen to position themselves as having the cause of black people at heart. It’s a little – if I may say so – I hate putting it this way because I don’t believe in leveraging my apparent quote identity unquote to get any kind of deference whatsoever – But I am frustrated, and I find this a little – condescending.
Juliet: I – I’m sorry. That’s not my intent. Obviously you’re entitled to your opinion. I hear how this impacts you, and – I’m sorry. I’m just trying to talk out of my experience here, and I know a lot of people who just do not feel that way –
Orsino: So do I. Some of them are my family. We argue about stuff. And we keep talking to each other.
Adam: As, I hope, we shall –
Emilia: Adam is scrupulous. He’s going to ask what people say, not what we guess about what they mean –
Ursula: This time I mean it. Why not both?
Juliet: – Oh sure. This reasonable tone, this respectful disagreement. It’s a way of dismissing people who get angry, who have had it, who are asking just not to be killed.
Adam: When was the last time you spoke to an Evangelical Christian, just out of curiosity? I suppose in your work you must –
Juliet: “Just out of curiosity,” of course, I guess I won’t speculate about what you mean there. I saw a long facebook post just this week. This Karen was going off about drag queens grooming in the schools and how sad it was that the fucking Confederate flag couldn’t be shown outside her kids’ first grade classroom –
Iachimo: You know this person?
Juliet: No, it was linked to in a post on someone’s Twitter I follow. Point is, she was plenty sure there were diabolical forces at work.
Adam: First of all, Emilia is very kind, but in fact I do have guesses about why people say what they do, and I act upon these surmises sometimes. I hope that I know they are guesses. But such speculation is perfectly in order. Secondly, I too can get angry. The faculty of the soul I’ve mentioned several times this evening, thumos, it’s Greek for the self-assertive function, the seat of that in us which can be affronted, and which mounts a defense. This is the irascible faculty, and I certainly hold that it has its place, and that denying it is folly. Thirdly –
Juliet: “Has its place,” that’s nice of you. The faculty of the soul.
Adam: Thirdly: when we argue for a position on inaccurate or invalid grounds –
Juliet: What’s inaccurate? What?
Adam: – we leave ourselves open to further mistakes which are even more egregious. As you said: it is important to call things what they are.
Juliet: Right, by reading everyone the fucking dictionary and translating into ancient Greek. Give me a break. Yes. Call patriarchy patriarchy. Call racism racism. Call transphobia transphobia. And call evasion evasion, not some fucking high-minded stand on rational principles. My God, I’m so tired of hearing straight, cis white men –
Adam: – Sorry - do you know I’m straight?
Iachimo: That’s right, you’ve only just met Adam.
Juliet: – recasting everything in the terms that suit them. Let’s be reasonable. Are you sure he meant it that way? Maybe he was just grabbing your ass to make sure you didn’t lose your balance. “She looked like she was asking for it.” Maybe he didn’t mean he was a demon, after all he just said he looked like one –
Adam: May I mention that those terms you just used – patriarchy, transphobia – those are Greek. Well, Greek and Latin –
Juliet: My God, that's exactly what I mean –
Adam: Alright then, let’s try a different track. You suggest we call things what they are. And, I’m sorry, but – you know, given your other commitments, it isn’t clear to me that you really mean that.
Juliet: How would you know what I mean?
Adam: I don’t – that’s what I’m trying to find out. To say nothing of whether you know or not. This principle – “we need to call things what they are,” “”it matters what we say” – who could disagree? But the principle didn’t get invented last year with the Washington Post and its bold stance of Speaking Truth to Power. What you are talking about is what the Confucians called the rectification of names. It’s a three-thousand-year-old principle from the Analects. Confucius says that if you start with this, everything else follows.
Emilia: That’s what Winston says, in Nineteen Eighty-four, about 2+2=4.
Adam: And for the same reason – it’s about telling the truth. Tolstoy says the same thing, in more than one place. It entered the twentieth century’s mainstream awareness by being championed by Ezra Pound –
Ursula: If you call Pound “mainstream.”
Adam: – the fellow who moved to Italy in the 1930’s, who wrote Jefferson and/or Mussolini, who spent World War II telling the American forces to give up and peppered his life’s work, his long and semi-unreadable epic The Cantos, with screeds against the Jews. Well then, is this “it matters what we call things” principle, a little, shall we say, fascism-adjacent?
Emilia: Adam, that’s unfair.
Iachimo: And ridiculous.
Ursula: He knows.
Adam: Its being unfair is the point. Of course it would be absurd to accuse someone of making a fascist argument because they said something like what Pound said, or even if they cited Pound. We use our arguments, regardless of who said them first (or something like them), in order to get at the truth, not in order to signal that we’re reading the right people, or “amplifying” the right voices, surely? If it turned out that the author of the Declaration of Independence had been, say, the owner of slaves, had slept with his slaves, had maybe even raped his slaves – that would not in itself invalidate the Declaration – would it?
Iachimo: As Ursula likes to say, “Watch out.”
Juliet: It makes Jefferson a hypocrite –
Adam: It can only be hypocrisy if the aspirations he writes of are different from, and indeed the opposite of, these actions. If the Declaration had proclaimed the white race to have been ordained by God to prevail over the Black, and to live supported by its labor, no one except racists would be turning to it today. My point is simply that the truth is the truth, and a formulation is a formulation, and it’s cheating to try to do a gotcha and say, Aha, you’re quoting Mussolini! Or whatever.
Ursula: Adam, when you get agitated you argue poorly. In the real world, we adduce conclusions from bedfellows all the time. Rightly or wrongly – I happen to think it’s quite interesting how we elide this – but surely, if I were to complain that no one should put any weight upon the fact that such-and-such a Nobel winner was a believing Catholic, because it just shows that scientists can compartmentalize as well as anyone, you’d pounce.
Adam: But fine, let’s accept the principle. If you don’t like Pound, we can go with Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language;” I doubt you’ll be much happier. Very well. It matters what names we use. It matters that we say the truth and not some watered-down or cherry-picked bouquet of convenient facts, and it matters that we call them by their accepted names, not terms of obfuscation. All right then – may I just say some other true things? Let’s start with this one: All Lives Matter.
Juliet: That’s exactly the opposite. It’s a slogan that’s meant to distract and –
Adam: I am not asking – let alone speculating – about the motives of anyone; I am talking about the words. Let us let it matter what we say. Why is it true, out of curiosity, that Black lives matter? It’s three words. One adjective, one noun, one verb: a formula of the form X(Y)=Z. Not unlike Putnam. All right, then, is Z, this “mattering,” is it true – if it is true – because of X, or because of Y?
Juliet: Is he always this insufferable?
Emilia: This is a new high. Low. Whatever. Adam what is it you’re trying to –
Adam: The scale seems to be uncertain. Low or high? It matters what we call things. Come now. Do they matter, do Black lives matter, qua “lives,” or qua “black”?
Iachimo: Well, I see what you mean. And of course, they matter qua lives.
Orsino: Thank you for not asking me.
Adam: Black lives matter because they are lives. They matter, that is, for the same reason that your life matters, or mine –
Juliet: No. I disagree. My life mattering isn’t in question in this society.
Adam: Whether it is in question is a separate issue. (I will remark, in parentheses, that so much difficulty could be avoided if people could just master this one move – the move by which one says, “that is a separate issue.” ) But what I am trying to ask after now, is why it would be true to insist that a life matters, not why it is necessary to so insist. I grant that in our society you may – many may – find it necessary to say loud and clear that black lives matter. But, why do they matter? Well, why does any life? I presume you acknowledge that your life matters?
Juliet: I’m not dignifying that.
Adam: Certainly you don’t think it could be true that your life matters because it’s a white life!
Iachimo: Well, there might be people who do think that.
Adam: Yes but I don’t think Juliet is one of them.
Ursula: You are laying it on, Adam.
Adam: I am. I am baffled by the need to lay it on. But here we are. Unless you are prepared to say that only black lives matter – which is, I want to underscore, something I have never heard asserted – then we are left with saying, as our friend Iachimo will perhaps kindly again assist us by articulating –
Iachimo: Because lives matter.
Adam: Human lives, per se. That is the actual reason. And so – it’s actually effectively a syllogism – premise one: All lives matter. Premise two: Black lives are lives. Conclusion: Therefore, Black Lives Matter. They may matter in a particularly “Black” way, if you like, because they are lived in a cultural context where that mattering is shaped and enacted in ways that are informed by black culture in the country, and that Black culture is always in dialogue – or, choose your word – with the surrounding white culture; and so on. All of that we can stipulate, all of that may have ramifications which remain to be explored. But the assertion Black Lives Matter is not addressed to Black culture; it is addressed to American culture, or Western culture, or – some context in which theoretically the force of the observation will strike home. Well, then: Black lives matter because – lives matter. Lives per se matter. All, yes all, lives.
Orsino: Preach it.
Adam: But of course, of course, we cannot say “all lives matter,” we can’t articulate this major premise of the syllogism, because somehow this perfectly ordinary sentence, this sentence whose meaning is utterly transparent, has been co-opted or kidnapped, has been made into a slogan instead of a sentence.
Juliet: But that’s just it. It’s not “transparent.” It doesn’t mean that anymore. It means –
Adam: Yes? What does it mean?
Juliet: It’s – it’s code for – it doesn’t mean what the words mean, it’s a dog whistle for people who want to ignore the legitimate complaints of Black people and have a screen of respectability –
Adam: Perhaps it will surprise you, but I readily concede – nay, I stipulate – that “All Lives Matter,” qua slogan, does indeed have a function that is retrogressive and reactionary. It’s been put forward, or at the least, it has been captured, by actors who really do seem either to believe, or to want to propound the message – without ever saying it outright – that some lives Matter more than others, and they aren’t the Black ones.
Juliet: But that’s just what I’ve been saying –
Adam: All of this is also true. And it ought to be possible to say this, to “call it out,” as I believe the phrase is, without surrendering the ground of the whole argument; without giving up the right to say what is also the truth, namely that all lives do matter – at least, if any do, all do; for how would we discriminate? I have no hesitation in dismissing most purveyors of “All Lives Matter” as a slogan – some of them are pretty unsubtle wannabe provocateurs, and others are simply unreflective about the wider context.
Juliet: OK.
Ursula: But that’s not what really irks Adam.
Adam: No. Their main fault is precisely the same as that of the so-called “other side” – they have had recourse to slogans, instead of to sentences.
Ursula: Shibboleths.
Adam: Yes. Exactly.
Juliet: Sorry, what?
Emilia: You said that earlier. I don’t know what it means either.
Ursula: A shibboleth is a password, a saying that must be repeated, and repeated correctly, pronounced correctly. It’s from the Bible somewhere – there’s a war on and people are trying to slip across enemy lines. So they set up a guard and make anyone coming that way say a certain word – shibboleth. The other people pronounce the word differently and have trouble making the sh sound; their mispronunciation gives them away. And they get slaughtered.
Adam: The point is that shibboleth has come to mean, a word or a phrase that you use to show you belong.
Orsino: To pass.
Adam: So it’s a slogan that serves as a sign – by virtue of your willingness to say it – of your belonging; as such it is ambiguous between a proposition and a token. And this ambiguity seems troublesome. What have you communicated by saying the slogan? What is its meaning?
Ursula: Didn’t this come up a couple of weeks ago? It’s a use-versus-mention question.
Iachimo: So, like Frege says about the morning and the evening star.
Adam: No, that’s slightly different. Frege’s distinction is between sense and reference. The phrases “morning star” and “evening star” have different senses. They have the same referent.
Orsino: Even the use/mention thing isn’t quite right here – to “mention” a slogan is to say something like, “the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ has three words,” or something like that. That’s different from “using” it as statement, for sure. But to just assert the phrase is also different from using it as a slogan, if you see what I mean.
Ursula: Don’t jump down my throat, Adam, but I’ve been giving some thought lately to Weimar culture, and Frege’s antisemitism is quite interesting, placed alongside others’ of the period – Weininger, even Wittgenstein, who surely had internalized a good deal –
Adam: Oh you don’t need to defend Frege to me. His late politics – as fascist as Heidegger, except he died earlier – were certainly execrable.
Juliet: Well that’s hardly surprising. I mean, I just have to say: when I hear this supposed distinction – this mention-versus-use distinction – getting made, I always brace myself; it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to use it to justify saying the N-word. “Oh, I wasn’t saying it, I just mentioned it, don’t get so offended.” So it makes a lot of sense that Frege turned fascist.
Adam: But again, there’s this red herring, this guilt-by-association. It is true that Frege seems to have been an anti-semite. It’s also true that he regrettably laid the foundations for 20th-century analytic philosophy. Much as I would like to link these things, however, that just won’t wash. His antisemitism doesn’t invalidate his logic. And if you want to dismiss the use/mention distinction you’ll have to do better than “some people use it to get away with saying slurs.”
Orsino: Can I ask you something? You’ve said this a bit – that you “brace yourself.” You seem pretty – watchful.
Juliet: I – Yes. I am. Can you blame me?
Ursula: You know, I can remember – it was not so very long ago – that in class or elsewhere, you might well do far more than simply “mention” this word. If one was reading a text in which this word occurred, one would go ahead and read it – say a poem by Hughes or a passage from Faulkner or Twain or Hurston. Because no one would dream of attributing intention to you as a reader. You might as well say that if I read a passage of the catechism, I’m speaking as a Roman Catholic.
Iachimo: Or if I quote Mao’s Little Red Book, or Mein Kampf, I must be preaching communism or Nazism.
Juliet: But that’s not the same. There are words that have been used to hurt, and are so offensive – and we need to – here’s the point – we need to listen to the groups who tell us, loud and clear, what those words are, and believe them, and –
Iachimo: Sorry, are you saying that Mein Kampf or Mao’s words weren’t used to “hurt,” as you call it? Because –
Juliet: No. And I would say that quoting from Hitler is actually in most cases obviously bad. But the difference with the N-word is that, first of all, it’s the word itself, not the ideas or the ideology but the word, and second, and I seem to need to repeat this, Black people have told us over and over not to say it. Like, what part of this don’t people understand?
Adam: But do you really think this word – and I’m not trying to, what did you say, “justify” using it, but I really do believe that our allergy to it is – well it’s what Ursula might call symptomatic.
Juliet: You know what’s symptomatic? If you’re not trying to justify it, then why go so hard on the issue at all?
Adam: The case is compelling because it happens to be – quite contingently – so uniquely charged. But – as Ursual points out – it hasn’t always been that way.
Juliet: It hasn’t always seemed that way, to white people who weren’t thinking about it. It was different for –
Orsino: Are you. Absolutely. Sure about that? Across the board?
Adam: It’s not as if it were a magic word. There’s certainly nothing inherent in the syllables themselves – no, not even in the history – to make it that powerful. Indeed – I almost think, though this is just occurring to me as I speak, that what starts with one word will eventually creep to encompass sentences and then whole discourses. We’ve been trained – we’re being trained – to react this way.
Juliet: Yeah you really do sound like you’re wishing for the good old days.
Adam: No. You misunderstand me. I’m just saying that we’ve been conditioned to respond to this word as if it’s not a word. And this spreads and spreads. This is what a shibboleth is. To say, or not say a word – but it’s not a word, it’s just a signal. To say a phrase – but without meaning it as a phrase, as an idea; again it’s just a signal.
Ursula: Well – I’m quite sure I disagree with an enormous amount of what you’re saying, Adam, but it is interesting to think about what happens when a word is repeated and repeated until it seems to be drained of significance. Its materiality comes to the fore –
Adam: It just seems so beneath human dignity to be able to be whipped into submission by –
Juliet: Did you really just say that? Whipped?
Adam: Oh ye gods.
Orsino: Well OK, I’ll go there then I guess. Look, I don’t want to deny that this word seems to be so radioactive right now that people have this Pavlovian reaction to it – I do too. But you know what – Adam’s right, that’s what it is, a reaction. And your reaction to this word “whipped” is the same thing – it just illustrates the point.
Juliet: I – I do not see. How you can pretend. To take words. Out of their historical context.
Adam: So – you do commend the study of history.
Juliet: Of course! That’s what I was saying – and that’s why, by the way, who you are matters, as you seem to be utterly in denial about admitting; because people who have for actually centuries of history enjoyed unexamined privilege are simply used to being taken seriously and having their point of view taken as being obvious, their approach as being the way of seeing things. And so any way that questions that, is either mocked with – when you come to look closely – this absolutely nasty derision; or else it actually has to be hunted down and exterminated, when it gets too loud to ignore.
Adam: I see. And this is why you can wave away an argument on the basis of it’s being, what did you say, a straight white man framing things to suit himself. But all right then – let’s imagine for a moment that I wasn’t.
Juliet: Wasn’t what?
Adam: White. Or male. Or fill in the blank. Would this make what I’ve said somehow bear more weight? Would you find it somehow more persuasive coming out of the mouth of someone who looked different?
Juliet: I know what you are arguing here, and I’m not biting.
Adam: What am I arguing? I’m quite serious. Maybe you can put the argument better than I can.
Juliet: The insinuation is that, in caring about who speaks, who gets to speak and who gets listened to, I’m ignoring some standard of acceptability, some supposedly universal canons of – logic or rationality, or something – in favor of some preferred category of identity. I’m not going to apologize for standing up for marginalized voices and perspectives. I’m partisan. I admit it. I’m proud of it. And I’ve told you why.
Adam: But – no, surely – you don’t maintain that the same thing can be either true or false depending merely on who says it – ?
Juliet: And you know that’s not what I said, and has no relation to anything I said.
Adam: But I don’t understand how it’s ruled out by what you do say. Do you think that only – what did you say – white, male, straight –
Orsino: Don’t forget cis.
Adam: – rich capitalists, or whatever it is you have decided I am, care about rational entailment? That you can reject an argument not on its merits but on the basis of who has made it?
Emilia: Adam, Juliet didn’t say –
Juliet: To repeat myself. Reasoning is situated and impacted by our positionality in the world. The idea of an independent rational agent looking on from their impartial position is just an ideological conceit. This is what I was saying about liberalism – this fiction that we just put all the options on the table and the best ones get somehow magically accepted, out of their obvious superiority. There’s no neutral perspective, in a situation where there’s already so much power imbalance. To pretend to be apolitical –
Adam: Ursula thinks I’m apolitical as well. You’re both wrong. I don’t reject politics at all; but I’m going to think about the political, and that means – as I said earlier – respecting the words I use to think. I’m not rejecting politics – I’m rejecting the sloganhood of it all. That’s my protest– to keep using a word, a phrase, precisely not as a slogan. Whether it’s “Black lives" or “all lives” that are held to matter, I cannot utter either slogan as a slogan, because I cannot think in slogans. No one can. For some, apparently, this is not a problem. But I am fighting, not for the right to say certain phrases, but for the right to think at all. I want to resist and fight against the capture of ordinary words, because those are the only kind we have. Otherwise they will all turn into either jargon, or –
Juliet: When some people have been basically begging for scraps since forever, having to fight for every little inch of being taken seriously, it’s just incredibly condescending to lecture them about the tools they use, to insist that they argue on your terms. If you want to be on their side, you start examining the standards they’ve been forced to conform to just to even get a hearing –
Adam: Ah – so you’re saying, a bad argument might not be bad, if it’s made by – someone in the name of the oppressed – ?
Orsino: Whatever happened to “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house?”
Juliet: What counts as a bad argument? Patriarchy and white supremacy and compulsory cis heteronormativity and capitalism have their thumb on every scale, because they are the scale, they invented the whole measuring system. I’m not saying you personally – you probably don’t even recognize –
Adam: Ah, no, I probably don’t – indeed, on your account I couldn’t. It’s the same ingenious, nay diabolical, heads-you-win-tails-I-lose argument. Why not both, indeed! If someone rejects an argument or a claim made by you – or, let’s imagine, by some “marginalized” or “oppressed” party – this rejection is clearly motivated not by the merits of the argument – it’s just a matter of the identity of whoever is doing the rejecting!
Ursula: I’d like to interject. There is certainly such a thing as ideology. And yes there’s also such a thing as – well, as a disavowing gesture by which we might say something like, “Yes, of course there’s ideology, but all the same …,” which is just one of the fascinating openings onto the infinite regress we have to short-circuit. But – and here I’m surprised to find I do agree with Adam – the short-circuit does turn out to be possible. Maybe impossibly possible – but if it weren’t, how could we ever even name ideology at all – ?
Adam: Good lord. Talk about finding some help where the danger is.
Juliet: Of course we can see that there’s ideology. That’s what I’m saying. And that’s why I work to point out to people that they have to commit to –
Adam: But you don’t have any standard of whether people have listened to your “pointing out” the ideology, except their agreeing with you.
Emilia: What do you mean, Adam?
Adam: I mean, if someone objects that an argument doesn’t make sense, you can dismiss the objection simply by virtue of whether they’re male or white – you needn’t actually pay attention to the argument at all. Their critique is just a condescending bit of ruling ideology. If anyone persists in not agreeing, it must simply be because they have some ideologically bound perspective that they are caught in. It couldn’t possibly be, rather, that they’ve found your argument unpersuasive on its merits! I can’t help but say, I find this whole approach completely alien – and actually quite frightening. If I must simply concede that someone has been done a wrong because they say they have – how did you put it, “if someone tells me they experience oppression, I believe them” – do you not see what sort of pandora’s box –
Juliet: Do you not see that there have been people – yes, white, cis, straight men at the top of the class system – who have always been able to say that they’ve been, not even oppressed, just inconvenienced, and the system always works for them?
Adam: Certainly there has been – and there remains – a lopsided power dynamic, which is manifest, in, among other ways, the encampments a few blocks away. But there is also, even now, a loud movement to call for rectification of this circumstance –
Iachimo: Loud. Tell me about it.
Adam: And how did this imbalance become noticed in the first place? By rational reflection, by –
Juliet: By people saying they’d had enough. You're just so invested in seeing yourself as above the fray that you can’t imagine what it’s like to be down in it. Only the thing is – you are in it. This picture of yourself is what your being in it looks like. You’re so attached to this idea of yourself as a free-thinking individual; you can’t see how much a function of your privilege your thinking is.
Adam: You cannot see what a simulacrum of thinking your signaling is. You simulate thinking in shibboleths, so you think everyone else does too. Is it really so inconceivable to you that people might have reasons for what they say? If you really think that – if you think I’m just a function of my “privilege”, as you call it, my situatedness as male or white or educated or what have you, why bother arguing with me at all? And does it truly just not-compute for you that someone might have listened to you, truly listened, and considered, and thought about what you contend – and come away unconvinced, not because they “can’t consider” what you put forward but because you haven’t convinced them? Is agreement with you the only index of having listened? Truly, this is what terrifies me: sooner or later your ilk will realize that, on your assumptions, addressing arguments to people who are functions of class instinct and white supremacy is pointless. Then they will cut to the chase. It’s happened before.
Julia: Oh my God, you actually did it – you went for the “Beware the slippery slope of the revolution.” Wait, let me get my bingo card. Go on, hit me again, maybe I can get five in a row.
Ursula: Adam, you might consider –
Emilia: Juliet, maybe –
Adam: But then, you’re not really arguing with me, are you? You just listen for these markers, these keywords. Your bingo card simply proves the point. Ye gods, a “slippery slope” argument! Can you actually listen to anyone? Honestly I wonder if you even listen to your “allies,” or whether you aren’t just responding a la Pavlov in the same way, only in those cases you like what you hear – and even then, you’re primed for someone to slip up. I’d ask you again – do you really think that comparison with the lessons of the past is pointless – of what’s happened under revolutionary regimes before? – it seemed a bit ago that you were asking us to keep the historical context in mind. But I think we’re clearly done here –
Iachimo: Is that Yorick out there?
Emilia: Oh thank God.
Juliet: I’m sorry. I should go.
Emilia: Please – Please stay. I really want you to meet –
Ursula: It is Yorick! With – does anyone recognize who he’s with?
Adam: No. I don’t believe so –
Juliet: Wait – I do. It’s Hero. Hero knows your friend Yorick?
Orsino: Hero’s the one in the wheelchair?
Iachimo: Well she isn’t Yorick.
Emilia: I think I know her, but from where?
Juliet: Hero volunteers with the meals for the encampments.
Emilia: No, I don’t think that’s where.
Juliet: She mostly coordinates, because the chair makes it hard to do distribution, but –
Orsino: I think there’s ice on the ramp, we should check.
Emilia: Yorick!
Yorick: I come late, but I come with a friend!
Hero: Hi.
Emilia: Come inside out of the cold.
Ursula: There’s tea waiting. Chai.
Orsino: Among other things.
Adam: Er, look, Juliet –
Juliet: Let’s not.
Hero: Tea sounds wonderful.
Emilia: We’ve got to see if we can fix the gap in this window frame.
Iachimo: What the Hell –
Juliet: Did the lights just flicker?
Yorick: There are rolling blackouts.
Hero: We went through a neighborhood where they were totally out.
Iachimo: And, there they go.
Emilia: Wow, it’s so dark.
Yorick: I assume it is the cold. The power system – there’s a great deal of strain.
Orsino: You have no idea.
Adam: Give him a moment and he’ll know more than us.
Ursula: And less. What with that docta ignorantia.
