Re: <nettime> Rudeness as a public service

["Dan Wang" <danwang@mindspring.com>]

> Some people say that I have very rude manners when I write.
> 
> I take that as a compliment.
>
> In a period of human history when every malicious and pernicious intention
> is couched in the most polite, sanitised, technical and obscure language,
> rudeness is a public service.
>
> Hitler called sanitised language "coordination". He called the mechanical
> murder of millions of people "the Jewish question", "question" meaning
> here much the same as "issue" means today. He knew very well what
> sanitising public expression meant: the closure of thought; the effective
> creation of a one-track public mind devoid of memory, context, and
> content.

When it comes to politeness, in the context of the U.S. at least, there is
also an issue of class signification. Middle-class civility constitutes a
vexed terrain for left/progressive Americans, and has ever since the
Sixties, when so many of the (at the time) youngish New Left came out of
middle-class backgrounds, in contrast to the recent immigrant/laboring
class Old Left. 

Could one really be radical but still subscribe to the codes of social
civility popularly associated with a bourgeois social standing? This very
question, saturated in ideological posturing as it is, tore apart many
radical groups, or helped move them into areas of social experimentation
and ego-smashing. . . . Interestingly, civility, among other
bourgeois/peasant cultural fault lines, even became a litmus test used in
the most charged scenarios of the Cultural Revolution in China. 

The question of civility remains an unresolved divide between peoples who
may otherwise forge alliances. Where I live (the south side of Chicago)
the perceived lack of manners of poor inner-city Black people is probably
the most effective brake on educated whites' sympathetic impulses--much
more so than anger flared by images of 'welfare queen' leeching. Your
basic liberal urban white American thinks 'I can sympathize with the
poverty, the lack of opportunity, the fear of police. . . but I cannot
tolerate the lack of manners.' To the point of staying in the city, paying
higher taxes, voting for the more progressive candidates, all decisions in
keeping with their liberal values. . . but they will not live in a
neighborhood of rude, loud, uncouth people. For the utterly civil, being
around those they perceive as rude probably causes more discomfort than
the fear of crime, which is what is usually cited as the reason for not
living in the poor part of town. 

That these strokes are drawn in terms of race and class complicates my
local society in ways perhaps not experienced by the student movements of
a past generation, at least not to this degree of immediacy. For example,
where there is real poverty, there will be real aspiration as well. Around
here, some of the poor and uniformly Black who hope to distance themselves
from the 'cousins' adopt often times very strict codes of civility, to the
point of an almost rigid formality. In the few social settings in which
true integration happens, the curious mixture of more formal Blacks with
working-class roots sharing space alongside ultra-casual whites of upper
middle-class upbringing strikes the observer as a two-way class posturing
in compensation of assigned, racialized social positions. Aspiration (with
its accompanying disdain for compatriots) and on the one hand, guilt (with
its self-hatred) on the other. 

> In Draconian Greece, the "terms of reference" were set by means of
> deliberative rhetoric designed by sophists. Then they adorned the
> remaining narrow set of terms (words, definitions, issues), which had
> already been decided beforehand, or which were undecidable from the start,
> with epideictic rhetoric, so transforming them into a distorted caricature
> of open debate.
>
> That is our "democratic" inheritance: Draco, not Socrates.
>
> Now, as then, polemical, unexpert, and dissenting terms that stray from
> the "terms of reference" are disallowed or discredited: they are artefacts
> of a dirty, inexpert, and disorganised reality.
>
> Rudeness is a public service. So is humour. So is memory. So is meaning.
> So is thought.

Getting back to language, I have to say that I agree with Mr. Graham.
Also, without rudeness, without offense, without attack, there is nothing
meaningfully complimentary, laudatory, loving. But please beware the
ideological positioning that happens on the level of not only
bureaucratized terminologies, but real and imagined codes of personal
conduct as well. 

dan w.






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