Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, September 06, 2009

The Non-Scandal of the Scandalous, the Scandal of the Non-Scandalous

Words like "asshole" "shit" and "fuck" are used by almost everybody in the world. They are utterly and absolutely non-scandalous.

I happen to think there is something fundamentally crazy-making about laws and norms which penalize everyday people for saying everyday things in everyday language in public places. I think there is something enormously serious and seriously wrong about the investment of the non-scandalous with scandal, especially given the insistent non-scandalousness of the actually scandalous.

The public/mediated world is saturated with images of violence and exploitation offered up as occasions for outright celebratory self-assertion or sentimental self-indulgence. Public figures, clothed in the ritual aura of seriousness, regularly imply that vulnerable American majorities (not to mention precarious and suffering billions of humans in overexploited regions of the world) have somehow earned their terrorizing vulnerability and that fantastically pampered and privileged American minorities have somehow earned their obscene privileges. Efforts to recognize or address in public discourse these palpable and catastrophic realities -- realities that are in fact abundantly suffered and understood as matters of shared concern -- are instantly and conspicuously dismissed as unserious, naive, romantic, emotionalist, disqualifying, meanwhile these most ubiquitous and colloquial utterances of everyday speech and everyday perception (for example, that people say "shit" and "fuck," for example, that women have bodies capable of enjoying sex and are fully capable of taking responsibility for their sexual practices) are invested with surreal scandal, outrage, devastating legal penalties in defiance of sense.

I believe that the utterly pointless and deeply falsifying policing of public discourse and professional discourse to exclude "bad words" that everybody uses and everybody knows everybody uses and everybody knows are as harmless as any number of other words that are in the widest possible circulation (for example: "competitive") functions as an enabling wedge rendering seriousness as such inherently less serious, rendering truth-telling as such less truthful in general -- and always only in ways that conduce to the benefit of incumbent interests, in the service of the essentially deceptive, irrational, immoral, impractical constellation of privileges enjoyed by self-appointed "elite" gatekeepers, professionals, credentializers.

And don't think I don't know that as a PhD. teaching professionalizing college students I am deeply implicated in this crazy-making constellation, however I resist it.

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