So, here’s one: what colour is Spiderman’s
skin supposed to be? I’ll give you a hint: that’s
a really silly question. I think if we’ve learned anything
from Across the Spider-Verse, it’s that reactionary white tears because "the character is an
ethnickity" is boring. It’s the first and most basic and most
boring roadblock to a lot of beautiful art with a lot of different
looking awesome people in it. Art with ethnickities is better. Cope. And the accusation that I’m only saying
that to be valida
ted in some kind of wokeness is the second most boring
and basic roadblock, because actually whether or not you personally understand,
Across the Spider-Verse is one of the most unapologetically
stunning pieces of art I have ever I have ever. And in defending it
I kind of don’t want to even waste my time
with reactionary politics. This film has shown me
how far ahead of the discourse the art is. You think “representation” or “tokenism”
are the main driving forces behind a character
like Hobie Br
own, and not, y’know, the artists intending
to make the coolest character possible? Then you, sir, should not be allowed
to do a media criticism. I know they say that there’s no wrong
answers in English class but this is worse than just “the curtains are blue” This is: there are no curtains. I stole the cur –
I set the curtains on fire. I don’t like curtains. Fuck you and your curtains. Do you remember
when the Hunger Games came out and people were mad
about the casting of Rue? You remember Rue?
She’s a smart child who forms a bond with
the main character, Katniss Everdeen? And decides, defiantly, despite the culture of death and betrayal around them,
to trust this other person, and ultimately that act
is the inciting incident for the revolution
and all the righteousness that follows, even though poor little Rue doesn’t
live to see it. Anyway, do you remember
people didn’t like it when it turns out that she was black? (damning clink sounds) Oh my god. Do you remember when they cast a b
lack
person as Death and a nonbinary person as Desire in Neil Gaiman’s television adaptation
of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel: Sandman. Decisions which Neil Gaiman
seemed to think were very good but lots of people who aren’t Neil
Gaiman seemed to think were yucky ideas. (more damning punctuating clicks) “I always thought that people loved Death
for who she was. The person that I wrote. I am astonished to find that,
for some people, what they thought she was, was a white woman,
and just a white wo
man.” Do you remember when JRR Tolkien spent
basically his entire life creating a fully functioning world with whole countries
and histories and languages. The most richly complicated
tapestry of peoples and cultures and different walks of life
and then people like Carl Benjamin “I hate everything” Have made literal careers
out of shitting themselves on camera whenever some of the people in that world
have dark skin. 'Because Middle Earth, uh actually, is supposed to be
a British world, for Bri
tish people.' (single damning clink) Do you remember the time
before the media went woke? Back before Spiderman went punk? When Uncle Ben was the president
and Batman was… Christian. Back when a straight white man
could actually get an acting gig? Without beloved characters like Ariel
the Mermaid or Sadoc Burrows the hobbit, getting stolen by minorities? Remember
when you could choose to ride a bus I mean, watch a movie without minorities in it? When Planet Earth was a real country? Neither do I
. We’re not gonna play around
with your reactionary politics today. This is a video about real representation
and why it actually matters. Go bother someone
else if you want a hit piece. (Big bold punk music with a triumphant bassline) Other Neil: Whoa, that’s kind of lazy allyship, isn’t it? Are you white? You look pretty white. Well then you are going to have to do
white-person allyship, I’m afraid, and actually break down
the reactionary politics and point at it and say that it’s bad,
for the
several thousand people who already agree with you
but who need to be told that today in order to keep strong and carry on.
And for the 15 and a half people whose minds you'll actually change. Neil: Probably this takes
a little bit of explaining. Maybe I can start by telling you
where I rank in the Oppression Olympics. So let's do this one last time. I’m Neil. I'm a Leftist Cook,
whatever that is. Everyone and their mother makes
video essays these days. I guess that's what COVID does to us.
I
was a weird 90s kid. I’m nonbinary and queer but that’s not
how people grew up in the weird 90s so my powers didn’t manifest
until later in life. I had two babies before I was 22. Got dumped.
Slept in my car. Met the love of my life
and we decided that together we were going to try and save the world. I want to save the world. Since then, things
have been pretty interesting. I got into an argument with a sentient
robot vacuum cleaner named Squintin and he sent me to the nightmare realm
of the i
magination of Michel Foucault. Just when I thought I was getting out
I split in two and now this other version of me —
Other Neil: Oh no you don't. It’s a video essay, not a fucking vlog. Nobody cares about
your backstory, Neil. In order to get to the bottom of this idea
of “The Oppression Olympics” let’s start with a quote by the great philosopher
and gentle lover, Benward Shapiro, from this video for PragerU entitled:
“What is Intersectionality?” Benward: You see, your opinion
only matters re
lative to your identity—and where that identity ranks
on the hierarchy of intersectionality. If you’re now thinking, “What the hell
are you talking about?” you haven’t spent much time
on a modern college campus. Intersectionality
is a form of identity politics in which the value of your opinion depends
on how many victim groups you belong to. At the bottom of the totem pole
is the person everybody loves to hate: the straight white male.
And who's at the top? Well, it's very hard to say because
new
groups claim victim status all the time. No one can keep track. I'll just pause you
there, Ben, to compliment you on how creative you are as a writer,
because this anxiety around being dominated, as Shapiro puts it,
being at the bottom of the totem pole. Well, maybe you’re
not that good of a writer. Do you know what a totem pole is? But this fear of not being on top,
can be manifested by losing at losing. By being the most powerful and free of oppression,
White Men are losing a competition.
The oppression competition. But this cannot be, for white men
must win all the things, even the things that contradict
the other things. He goes on, with further wit
and reverie. Benward: So, how does this
intersectionality thing play out? Something like this:
Let’s say you’re a gay, white woman. Your opinion matters, but less than that
of a gay, black woman. Why? Because while all women are oppressed
by the patriarchy, and all gays are oppressed
by the heterosexual majority, blacks have a vict
im status
that whites obviously don’t. Of course, a gay black woman’s
victim status is less than that of a black trans woman, who ranks below
a black, Muslim trans woman, and so on. The more memberships
you can claim in “oppressed” groups, the more aggrieved you are,
and the higher you rank. Get it? Good. Because it’s about to get
even more complicated. Other Neil: Whoa, hehe, slow down there cunt. Let’s not blow everyone’s
minds with your cool kid’s philosophy. 3.9 million views. Before we do t
oo much of a deep dive into the academic studies that no doubt
back up this claim, which is itself measurable, and, uh, meaningful,
what I want to know is how is this going to affect me? (silence) I mean, as a white person, does this mean people aren’t
going to take my opinions seriously? (silence) Am I in danger? Ben? Benward? What about my Dad? Or all my former bosses. Or the vast majority of people
in positions of power? They’re all white guys. Are they gonna stop winning arguments? Lose al
l their money? Get cast out of the dominant positions in politics, the media,
and the marketplace of ideas? Are all of the landlords and bankers
going to become disabled autistic black trans muslim otherkin
lesbian AI-generated horse-people, Ben? Wait. No, I’m confused. Because even what you outline
is that the experience of oppression, because it can be thought
of as qualitatively affecting different groups of people
at different levels, therefore can be thought
of as a hierarchy. Your assertio
n is that “the
left” conceive of that oppression, altogether, with one another,
in agreement, which we’re famous for, we conceive of that oppression
as a hierarchy, just like Ben does. We want it that way. It serves us. And that’s
why we don’t listen to straight white men. In situations where there are opportunities
to listen to straight white men, presumably when they offer novel
contributions to the concerns of “the left” being the helpful dears that they are. Okay, well, putting aside Žižek,
Yanis
Varoufakis, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Tom Nicholas, Billy Bragg,
Terry Pratchett, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Neil Gaiman,
and my Dad as just some of the left-wing white men
that get very much listened to, largely to the exclusion of a bunch
of black people and women that wouldn’t be quite so easily called to mind,
I'm just curious about something, Ben. Why do you fucking care? I mean, there are lots of other
competitions that wouldn't require PragerU graphics and logic pretzels
to il
lustrate as foundationally unfair. Like, for example, the (big angry sound burst) If you were to guess
now I'm speaking to you, now. I'm not speaking to Ben anymore.
I'm mad at him. If you were to guess which country has won
the most Olympic medals ever. Which country would you say? I'll give you a hint. (clicking sound of a gun engaging) That's right. The USA with 2980 medals. Oh, my God, the best country. Followed by the United
Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy. All truly accomplished and tal
ented
countries that deserve to win things. Who's in the bottom, you ask? Oh just a bunch of shitholes really Egypt,
Estonia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, all those kinds of places. Look: here’s this handy graphic
to illustrate, countries ranked by the number of Olympic medals
they’ve won. Just to make it easier to understand I’m
gonna put a compass next to it. Look: North. South. North. South.
Forget about Australia. Okay, I’m being petty. I’m being mean to Ben Shapiro. For shame. He would never sink
this low with me. I should try to hold myself to the same
rigorous standards he holds himself to and get to the bottom of this
with an open mind and a humble heart. We’ve spoken before on this channel,
a few times now, about how some identities are permeable, and others are impermeable. Now, like with everything else
we’ve talked about on this channel these aren’t clean distinctions. It’s a theory from social psychology,
we place arbitrary boundaries in incredibly fuzzy and interactive
phenomena
, but, just to ground it an example: let’s think of being a
Deadhead as a permeable identity. People go fucking hard on the Grateful Dead. They live that Grateful Dead life. This is my partner and co-creator Sarah
and there will be more from her later but this is when she was such a jam band
nerd. Look at her. Jerry Garcia had been dead since the 90’s. The Dead were already not a thing. But Deadheads always will be. The music, the ideas, the lifestyle,
jamming, dancing, life on the road baby. F
uckin hippies. But just ‘cause you dropped out
doesn’t mean you can’t drop back in. You can crave songs that aren’t
five hours long. You can really want to just work
in Subway and wear Lacoste polo shirts. The identity you had,
however strong, is permeable. And so, while it is not really fair to say
that if there was oppression against Deadheads, it’s on them. They’re choosing that life. It’s not fair to say that people
should have to leave their identities, or justify them,
or fight for them t
o exist. Deadheads are valid. But impermeable identities, the ones that are foisted on us by circumstance and chance, are not ours
by consent. Ben is making the reverse racism argument
with extra steps. Any form of “discrimination”
and discrimination here can be thought of as identification
itself, is to Ben, an attack. You should not, in a democratic society,
say that you expect to be oppressed by white people. You should not, if you claim to be a
just and ethical person, say that you have anxi
eties
around the behaviour of men. In this framework,
colour blindness and gender conformity, are the only true expressions of fairness. And if we award the right to comment,
on a social phenomenon, to one group and not to another,
that is discriminatory. The Oppression Olympics,
intersectionality, makes an unfair arena of the marketplace of ideas.
And, well, we are drawing borders across identities that people did not
choose for themselves, right? Whiteness is impermeable;
it cannot be escaped.
It’s here. In my skin. In my voice. In my hair.
In the colour of my eyes. In the way I drive
like this, and jump like this. It is an impermeable part of who I am. How could anyone possibly move through
the membrane of white and not white? Well I am talking about Ben Shapiro,
who is a Jew, a group who some people consider white
at some times, but not other times. And I, for my sins, am Irish. A group that is white now,
but has not always been Neil: Don’t fucking talk about the Irish. Other Neil
: The fact that the Irish, and Jewish
people, have not always been considered white is an important staple in the video
essay canon. How else can we show
that race is socially constructed? Neil: Do you want white supremacists
to take this out of context? Other Neil: Do you want a high click-through rate? Neil: Then why not just go fully into it
and have a big old debate? Other Neil: Oh, a debate! I didn’t think you’d be willing to have a debate. That’s not really your thing is it? Neil: Do you w
anna have a debate?
A real debate? A no holds barred,
no compromise battle of the minds to determine which idea is
truly the champion of clevery-do! To see whose framework is more consistent? Whose plot has holes? The term “Oppression Olympics” was first
recorded in a white hot debate between feminist juggernauts Elizabeth “Betita”
Martínez and Angela “Fuck You” Davis. This would set the stage for one of
the biggest rifts in all of philosophy! How do we Oppression? Do we ask 'who is the most op
pressed?' and lose
our greatest allies and greatest ideas or do we ask 'who has the best ideas?'
and lose the battle with bias and hierarchy damning the most vulnerable
in our society to the margins, forever. Except it wasn’t a debate. It was a conversation. Martínez and Davis were
agreeing with one another. They were just vibing. Here’s the quote, from Martínez: “There are various forms of working together. A coalition is one, a network is another,
an alliance is yet another. And they are not
the same; some of them
are short-term, and some are long-term. A network is not the same as a coalition. A network is a more permanent,
ongoing thing. I think you have to
look at what the demands are, and ask: What kind of coming together do
we need to win these demands? And if you know the administration
will pick your groups off one by one, then the largest umbrella you can possibly
get is probably the best one. Some of the answers to your question are tactical
and depend upon the circumstance
s. But the general idea is no competition of
hierarchies should prevail. No “Oppression Olympics”!” And Davis, legendary Davis, vibed back like this: “As Betita has pointed out, we need to be more flexible in our thinking about various ways
of working together across differences.” Other Neil: This isn’t a debate.
Neil: And I think, in that spirit, when we talk about whiteness
in a contemporary context, and try to contrast that with Irish
“non-whiteness” the very information we are trying to conv
ey
about socially constructed race gets lost. The nature of Irish disenfranchisement
then was always, always deeply structurally
and functionally different to the disenfranchisement
of non-white people. Especially Black people. That’s the part
we have an ethical responsibility to not debate.
And the lesson we can learn from Spiderverse is that there isn’t
an Indian Spiderman instead. There’s an Indian Spiderman as well. No oppression olympics. This is why it’s so important
to understand the actu
al theoretical underpinning of identity politics
and not just shoot your mouth off about the wikipedia page that looked like
it had the most wokeness in it. God I wish Sarah was here (phrase repeates in despairing echos echos) (♫ Tinkling piano keys for Manchego's theme,
a playful Ghibli-inspired tune ♪ ) God I wish Neil was here. (snare drum) All right, let's get the boring stuff out of the way. So we're all on the same page. (♫ Manchego's theme continues, still light in tone but now with more
dense instrumentals and drums 🎶 ) We’ve all got a ton of identities, ways
that we see ourselves, ways that we connect with others, things
which shape our experience of reality. Some of them are super important to us,
others are incidental. Some are ones we’ve chosen and others
are ones people have imposed onto us. And our identities can be made salient
or not at different times. When I’m at home in my dressing gown
with my cats, I’m probably not thinking about the fact
that I’m an immigrant.
But you better believe I’m
hyper aware of that identity every time I leave and re-enter the country
and have to stand in a different queue from the rest of my family
and show different paperwork and answer a bunch of questions
which determine whether or not I’m allowed to go home
to said dressing gown and cats. And there are other identities that are
more complicated because of hegemony. Neil and I remind you
all that we’re white people a lot, because it’s important
for you to remember, and for
us to remember, that
being on top of that specific hierarchy is going to bias our perspectives,
even with the best of intentions. But “white” isn’t really an identity
the way “immigrant” is, and that’s because of hegemony. Like, if I just made up, tomorrow, a
“white” way to dress for a job interview, it would pretty immediately synonymous with the “professional”
way to dress for a job interview. Little white girls don’t get sent home
from school for wearing their hair naturally, lanky straight h
air doesn’t
get seen as distracting. White, in so many ways, isn’t
an identity, it’s invisible, it might be a “racial” category
but it’s not actually racialised. And while people can be proud
of being Korean or Arab or Tagalog or Black, knowing only that about someone actually doesn’t
give you a ton of information about them, but it tells you a lot about someone if they tell you
that they’re proud of being white. And I have stuff to SAY about that
but we have to establish more stuff first, so, b
eing the obnoxious
youtuber pseudointellectual that I am, I’m going to tell you to put a pin in that. So we know now what an identity is. But the term identity
politics is a big more vague. It was coined by Rennee Anspach
who was describing how disabled and mentally ill people were using
their identities as paths to activism. Anspach observed that the taking up
of these stigmatised identities was key in interrupting
the process of stigmitisation. Writing in the 1970s,
Anspach talks about devianc
e theory, the sociological idea that stigmatised ways of being are seen
as a personal flaws or deviations. The label assigned to these groups is designated unidirectionally, the society
imposes the label on the person. Think of how frequently the stigmatised
identity gets a name, and the rest of us just get to be called “normal.”
Think of how angry some people get
when the marginialised group wants a word besides “normal”
to describe other people on that scale. "We were fine with saying 'trans,'
but we don’t want to be called cis." Or, "we were fine with writing criteria
for 'autistic' but we don’t want criteria for being 'allistic.' " By taking up the label
and owning the identity, disabled and mentally ill individuals
were able to change the conversation and perceive the political processes happening at the root
of their marginalisation. This meant that physically disabled
people were able to interrupt a nondisabled public’s narrative of pathos
and pity, while people with mental illn
esses were able to speak
without being discounted as hysterical. Anspach was writing about a change
taking place where the organisations to advocate for disabled
people were being run by disabled people rather than their surrogates,
which was new. But equally important, these groups were not buying
the presumption that their goal should be to integrate
into normative society, but instead to disrupt. They were here to
fuck shit up. As Anspach says: “The new activism, with its spate of organizati
ons
and its outpouring of publications, is self-consciously polemical in tone,
characterized by its open agitation for legislative change
and architectural reform, its militant opposition
to job discrimination, and its frequent reliance on demonstrations
and the tactics of social protest.” One of the most famous
and memorable of those actions happened about ten years after Anspach
coined the term, with the Capital Crawl. This was 1990 in the United States,
where the legislation called the Americ
ans with Disabilities
Act had stalled. The act was calling for the most meager
baseline of accessibility for disabled people to access public life as a protest
against the banal death of the act. Hundreds of disabled people came to the Capitol building,
throwing their mobility AIDS aside. Activists ascended the 78 marble
steps of the building. Crawling, dragging, inching up. It was a brutal demonstration
of how inaccessible spaces could be. “I’ll take all night
if I have to!”
Activists were not
asking for people to be nicer,
they were asking for concrete changes, pun very literally intended. The action forced congress
to take up the bill and the act passed. And this protest is not dissimilar
to many protests by Queer activists or Black activists,
or any other civil rights activists. Anspach was writing about the phenomenon
as “new” in the disabled community. I think Anspach was noticing
that some people come from lineages of stigmatised identities,
while others have to find each other
and build community because they have been randomly dispersed
through the population. A latine person is generally going to have
latine family who also share the experiences of being latine
in a given cultural context. This is not necessarily the case for someone who is deaf
or schizophrenic or who uses a wheelchair. Especially when society is oriented
in keeping disabled people silenced and hidden or locked away,
a lot of the issues any given person
faces can be seen as individual. But when peo
ple with a stigmatised
identity are able to connect, they can spot the ways that
their oppression is shared and systemic. And this was 1990. That was before
the proliferation of the internet. Now we are able to connect
and find each other in more ways. We don’t have to undergo the trauma
of getting kicked out of our natal homes and heading to the big cities
before we find other queer people. People with mental health conditions
can meet other people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia
or diss
ociative identity disorder without having to first experience
a crisis or be institutionalised. We can explore the shape of what it means
to be neurodivergent in real time and that’s new because that concept,
that word, it didn’t even exist before I was born.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It would be wrong to outline the triumphs
of identity politics in a vacuum. Identity politics are politics,
and they are critiqued from a few sides. The more familiar critique
comes from conservatives, and t
heir opposition stems
from wanting to uphold the status quo. What the Hell are you talking about?
You know, the status quo which says that our society only should
accommodate one specific type of person and anyone else
should either try to conform or else accept their intentional social
disenfranchisement. My go-to conception is liberal feminists
versus tradwives. Liberal feminism says start wearing
pantsuits, learn a firm handshake, lean in.
And tradwives
say wear dresses, do makeup, graciousl
y accept and even relish
being a second class citizen because that makes it less
emotionally difficult to live. It’s a very specific discourse:
play by man’s rules or accept subordinate womanhood. It’s a false dychotomy and it does truly
nothing to disrupt the status quo, and I don’t think any of you
watching are sympathetic to this. You are, likely, a leftist.
But as you’re
no doubt aware, there are a lot of different
kinds of leftist. And you’ll also be aware that there is
a whole contingent o
f leftists who have different ideas
when it comes to identity politics. A group of people who offer a Marxist
opposition to identity politics And I think it’s important
for us to engage with these politics, because it’s important to continually
evaluate our attempts at Praxis, and also because many of the splits
in Leftism are hard to handle. There are real ideological differences
between Leninists and Anarchists. They require a series of big conversations
and it’s not something we can solve in
a YouTube video. But the split on identity politics,
frankly, is. Because the debate centers
around an empirical question: whether identity politics is helpful
or harmful to a revolutionary cause. And this is a question
with an actual answer. There are several Marxist
critiques of identity politics. The most common one focuses on one main
thesis: the locus of systemic oppression is based in class,
and any other oppression is secondary, and thus focusing on identity-based
oppression is not actual
ly going to combat “real” oppression.
At best, it’s
going to be a distraction, at worst, it can create an artifice of progress
while the root of oppression, capitalism, goes unaddressed. In fact,
by putting so much emphasis on identity, we may be reinforcing rather
than combating social stratification. And while this line of reasoning didn’t appeal to me,
I can see why it might appeal to some. Because it is the same line of reasoning
which I did find appealing as a teenager when I first started
engaging
with feminist works. The gender binary
is the root of all oppression. I, a white lady, am here to tell you…
It is appealing to hear that the forces that oppress
you are the most important forces. It isn’t necessarily sinister either,
because seeing everything boiled down to one issue, one locus of oppression,
it’s comforting in a way. It means that we all should just refocus our efforts on that one issue
and the others will sort themselves out. But it can also mean that you see other
fi
ghts for liberation as distracting. Because their causes,
their identities, are viewed as symbolic or cultural,
and in that way: valueless. As grumpy-redditor
or debate-bro as this movement sounds, it actually started way earlier,
in at least the 90s. Thinkers like L.A. Kauffman called them “anti-politics,”
claiming that concerns about identity had diverted from challenging
institutionalised power structures and towards apolitical introspection,
A direct critique of the “the personal is politica
l”. She claims that yes, organising around
identity can be helpful,
but that we have lost our way and focused more on superficial and cultural changes
rather than systemic ones. She goes after Kate Millet’s conception
of Sexual Politics and Patriarchy. Millet, you’ll remember, was a radical feminist,
and as far as I can tell not a TERF. Millet wrote her book Sexual Politics
based on the idea that patriarchy… exists. That gender-based oppression
was not just a result of disconnected policies,
but
was an ideology which also needed to be tackled
in order for those systems to ever change. That the relationship
between genders needed to be disrupted, and that this, at both a micro and macro
level, could be seen as a political event. Kauffman believes that this reasoning
leaves the movement open to corruption. That empowerment can be confused
with political action. Having seen feminism
be so heavily commodified, I don’t think Kauffman is wrong to be nervous. But I think it’s interesting
look
ing at the concrete examples that Kauffman cites
as “good” identity politics. Like Marcus Garvey,
who she praises specifically for his focus on Black state
building and black wealth generation. And I am way too white
to be able to comment on the best path for Black liberation, but I would urge
any of you watching who aren’t already following FD Signifier you're all already following FD Signifire But you should all go engage
with some of his work on this topic. What I can say is
that Kauffman is
not spotting how this same attitude,
this “focus on the economics first” can lead to the exact symbolic victory
she’s worried about. This thinking underlies the very nature
of the Girlboss Feminism of the 2010s. Because “buying women owned”
and putting posters of female CEOs on your little girl’s bedroom wall,
it doesn’t do anything to challenge the political landscape we’re
living under. By focusing away from a joint struggle
against the social phenomena that is patriarchy,
we are in many ways
creating the very hollow tokenism we’re
trying to avoid. A world where success is superficially possible
for those of us in marginalised groups, and so the forces of marginilisation
can be ignored. And that leaves us back to square one,
with Asexuals marching in the Pride parade while a group of well-actually men
asks them over and over and over to detail why they feel oppressed when they too can
pull themselves up to be Sheryl Sanburg. There are societies in the world
outside of capitalism. A l
ot of them still have castes or gender divisions
or other structures of marginalisation. To say that one metric of oppression,
class, supersedes
all of the others is a bold claim. But it’s even bolder
still to say that advocating for your own identity group is a waste of time
and a distraction from liberation. As if Angel Davis, the philosopher
and civil rights leader and Marxist, wasn’t told that she was doing something “inappropriate”
by being a female leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordina
ting Committee.
“Some of the brothers came around only for staff meetings (sometimes),
and whenever we women were involved in something important
they began to talk about “women taking over the organisation” –
calling it a matriarchal coup d’etat. All the myths about Black women surfaced. Bobbie, Rene, and I were too domineering,
we were trying to control everything, including the men —
which meant by extension that we wanted to rob them of their manhood.”
Angela Davis! I can’t think of a bette
r person
to follow than Angela Fucking Davis. Who, in being forced out and having her
female colleages forced out, watched much of their community
building efforts fail when their chapter of the society
collapsed right afterwards. Unaddressed
bias will hurt anticapitalist goals. I would like to combat
sexism and capitalism and white supremacy, and luckily for me, the aims of those movements are not
in opposition, they are complementary. There are other arguments
against identity politics though.
Some thinkers have argued
that identity politics, in trying to build pride in marginalised identities
actually links us to our woundedness, what some literature refers to
as the Reinforcement Problem. Wendy Brown is likely
the most prolific of these thinkers, her initial argument reinterprets
the Nietzschean conception of resentment to claim that some groups
have become attached to their marginalisation,
a state she calls “wounded attachment,” and as such are unable to conceive
of anything beyo
nd their marginalisation. Thus, she claims, identity politics
lock us into the status quo, blocking our ability
to actually overcome hierarchy. Instead, we should be looking
to a more constructive form of leftist future building
rather than one based on resentment and woundedness. Given the literature I’m most familiar
with, when I think of this argument I think of second-wave feminism,
and it’s insistence that femininity is synonymous
with subjugation, and any celebration of such is actually
a
reinforcement of patriarchal norms. So yes we’ve got Mary Daly
and her twittering fembots, which is very easy to mock, but feminists
who are much more respectable invoke it too. Kate Millet, for one, who says:
“Through this system [of patriarchy] a most ingenious form of “interior
colonization” has been achieved. It is one which tends
moreover to be sturdier than any form of segregation, and more rigorous
than class stratification, more uniform, certainly more enduring.”
Yes, that’s the same Ka
te Millet. Or, for a more recent argument, in 2010
Sandra Lee Bartky writes:
“In the regime of institutionalized
heterosexuality, woman must make herself ‘object
and prey’ for the man: it is for him
that these eyes are limpid pools, this cheek baby-smooth. In contemporary patriarchal culture,
a panoptical male connoisseur resides
within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze
and under his judgment. Woman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriar
chal Other.”
It’s
scary to potentially be on the other side of something
from Wendy Brown and Kate Millet. But: I still largely think I’m right. And that’s based on examining how identity
politics often actually operate. Let’s look at femmephobia. Let’s start with an anecdotal conception: Have you seen people’s
reaction to the Barbie Movie? I naively asked my stepdaughter
why people were so excited about it and I got a lecture
I will not soon forget about femmphobia and non-sexualised femininit
y
and the female gaze. She’s 15 and she put me to shame. One movie comes out about a doll
we all played with as kids and half of twitter starts photoshopping themselves
into pink plastic set pieces. Because femme culture
is more than just oppression. Because identity isn’t
exclusively about hierarchy, because people form identities
around bands they like and sports teams they like and cities they live in. And because the identities we’re oppressed
under are so large, they necessarily encompass
b
oth the aspects of oppression and those which have nothing to do with oppression. Like the colour pink. Or playing with dolls. These are cultural signifiers of “girl”
but even under our contemporary system it’s difficult to point to why embracing
either of those is something bad. And if they were, my question
is: what should be do about it? I guess let’s get rid of all of the
barbies and the colour pink, I wouldn’t care too much about that to be honest, I’m
pretty bad at winged eyeliner anyway.
But what about for other groups? I think we all can agree
that African Americans have had a pretty historical case
for having been “wounded” and having their culture be developed
in the “wounded” state of being ripped from their homes and families,
losing access to ownership over their lives and bodies,
and then subjected to generation after generation
of systemic disenfranchisement. So I'd ask which parts
of African-American culture should we say
they are not allowed to practice? Here it's just
me, a cis white lady. Let's discuss, shall we? Is jazz woundedness. How about hip hop?
I'm getting hip hop high on the list. Are you going to tell little black boys that they need to pull up
their pants to be respected? Because if we say that all
oppressed peoples fighting for their identities are really just enforcing their otherness by
clinging to woundedness, than I think what is left is just assimilating assimilating into the cultural norms
of the groups already in power. Encultrating to
whiteness and straightness and
maleness and allotypicality and And like, where does this get us? Besides which,
this entire debate about femininity is so clearly led
by and centered around cis white women. Because when the voices of other women
are included, femininity begins to look differently
because it has often been denied to women of color,
fat women, disabled women, AMAB women or people
who aren't women, whether they be nonbinary
or even just male. As one theorist writes:
“Racially mark
ed femininities 'rip open' dominant
assumptions of femininity and, specifically,
those embedded within feminist theory. In so doing,
the femme subject forces us to reconsider and rethink feminine assumptions,
by way of race, in addition to cisnormativity,
heteronormativity and ableism.” Femininity is more complicated
than wounded attachment to oppression. So to counter Brown, who for the record
had a more nuanced argument than I can probably accurately summarise,
one could look at how identity
politics can be employed to simultaneously uplift
marginalised members of society and deconstruct
the mechanisms of their marginalisation. Look at Judith Butler: Butler
can simultaneously be a feminist writer who acknowledges
that women are socially oppressed, while at the same time breaking apart
the ontological construction of woman and the gender binary. Butler isn’t
trying to police us into ignoring gender, or just all using male pronouns
and escaping into maleness as a culture, Butler uses
they/them pronouns and writes
about how TERFs are fascists. Butler has identities and advocates
for them under a postmodern framework,
which is, identity politics. Look at something like drag, a temporal
and performative embrace of gender, which uses femininity to muddle
the gender binary, simultaneously
undercutting and appealing to gender norms whilst overtly
challenging rigid heterosexual worldviews. This stigmatised identity,
womenness, femme, it can literally be repurposed
as an anti-patria
rchical tool. Or, if you want a broader example,
look at Queer politics in general, an identity constructed as a response
to the middle-class white hegemony which dominated general LGB identity discourse -
and if you want more info on that, I did a whole queer theory
history less in our last essay. We’re doing thematic links
now friends, it’s all connected. The point is,
whether you're being purely antagonistic or more nuanced, “wounded
attachment” is not enough of an argument against the power
of identity politics
to reshape society. Especially when it is often utilised
to try and get the most marginalised among us to shut up and conform.
Because we are cultural beings and even those of us whose identities
were forged in marginalisation have built cultural relationships to that identity
extending past being victimised.
Pride isn’t a group of gay
people crying about having been hurt. Yeah the rainbow flag has the black strip
to remember AIDs victims,
but it’s also got fucking colours.
Our identities aren’t stagnant,
and they’re not so easy to give up. As Allison Weir states: “Identity
politics has always been a complex process involving finding ourselves identified
as belonging to a particular category (women, blacks, gays), and identifying
with these particular “we’s,” and constructing our identity
through active processes of resistance, of making meaning, through political struggle,
through identifications with each other, through creating new narratives,
and thereby (re)cr
eating ourselves, and our identities.”
So there. That’s some fucking theory for you. And you may be inclined to believe that I am the most rah rah identity
politics person to exist. But because it’s the Lefttist
Cooks, we’ve got to go further. Identity politics is not good in a vacuum,
it is a tool, not a path, and it is not inherently going to lead to liberation
unless we utilise it properly. And on that point, we
haven't been doing as well as I'd like. Neil: So what is woke? We could
go back t
o the origins of the word. Other Neil (annoyed): Here we go. Neil: The term 'stay woke' prior to two thousand and fourteeeeeeeeeen Neil: The term stay woke prior
to 2014 was not only far more specific in its meaning,
but far more specific in its culture. Used by the African American community
and essentially meaning “stay vigilant” “Woke” meant keep an eye out
for the telltale signs of racism, potential deception, potential danger,
potential traps, which unless you were vigilant
you wouldn't spo
t, because we live in a polite
bigoted society where only the disenfranchised groups
can ever see the dangers, and even they're only supposed to see them
too late. Useful term, as you can see. But what happened in 2014 to change
this was the murder, by police, of an 18 year old black kid in Ferguson
Missouri, and his name was Michael Brown. Say it. It was by no means the first murder
by police of a young black man but for various reasons the term “Stay
Woke” came to mean more specifically, stay
vigilant for the violent brutalising murdering
cops, see it, and talk about it. This was also the beginning of Woke’s
slide into more common parlance. Unfortunately,
when you give white people a new toy they take it out of the packet
and slap it around and get it all sticky. So on the left the definition of Woke
started to become so broad, "being on the lookout for and standing against
police brutality and racial violence" became "being aware
of police brutality and racial violence" and then be
came "being aware
of all racial injustice, in a vague way," and then that became being aware of…
anything remotely injust. And that would be fine,
I guess, or not so bad. I mean African Americans are used to
having all of their best ideas attributed to the Rolling Stones or whatever,
but it wasn't just people on the left. On the Right,
Woke came to mean, well... (cocophony of grumpy Brits) And worse The Woke Mob can rant
for all they’re worth but I’ll keep adding Worcestershire
sauce to my Spag
Bol Woke became a stand-in
for the threatening ideology B.M: First of all,
what is the Woke Mind Virus? Neil: Similar to what’s come before, the Red Scare, the Neo-Marxists,
the Jews, the Lavender Menace. Elliot Muskrat: I think we need to be very cortious
about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that that results in the suppression of free speech
You can’t question things. Uh. Even the questioning is bad. Neil: A step further, I would argue,
than the demonisation of the term Canc
eling. Elmer Mosquito: And obvioulsy people have tried to cancel
you many times
B.M: Many times Eel Mudflaps: Yeah, I mean
B.M: Every week Neil: In that
the substantive details and consequences of “Woke” are harder
to make an actual spectacle of, but the threat feels more ever-present
and all encompassing. Why anything could be woke. It could be a feeling. Lady: It, uh, it could be a feeling. Neil: Your own children could be Woke! It didn't matter that the term has become
essentially meaningles
s. So meaningless
that only white liberals use it in any kind of positive sense,
a terribible fate for any word. The meaning of words
certainly changes, I’m not denying that. The popularity of words,
the gradual retirement of the old and the cringe invention of the new,
even the occasional resurrection of words, these are all well-documented processes of change to the sounds we make
what have the meaning. But to me, with a term like Woke, it isn't exactly the straightforward
evolution of languag
e. It’s something more. People like … Michel Foucault michel foucault
Argued
that what we think is solid and stable in discourse
and our understanding of reality is actually constantly changing
and being revised under various social and political projects. Something political happened to “woke”
and to “Canceled”, and to BLM, and Antifa,
and critical race theory. Those words went through
a political transformation. To me, there is another more active force
at play than organic shifts in meaning.
What I like to think of
as “linguistic gentrification”. We can think of languages like cities,
and vernaculars like neighbourhoods, and words as kind of like houses
and businesses in the neighbourhoods. Back in the middle of the 20th century,
the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s there was a funky strange old house in the neighbourhood
called “Transvestite”.
Suzy Izzard um identified as a transvestite
in the 80s and 90s, but that word has very different connotations
now in terms of gender identity. Tha
t old property has seen better days. These days Suzy Izzard uses she/her
pronouns and the identifier of Trans Woman. Did her identity shift
or did the language shift?
Yes, because we do adapt our identities and our self identities as connotations
and meaning change over time. Doesn't change who we are or what
we intend by way of those identities. But the hegemony doesn’t play fair. And as Foreign Man said, “Names
for minorities will continue to change as long as people have negative attitudes
to
wards them. We will know that they have achieved
mutual respect when the names stay put.”
Say,
the meaning of the word oh I don’t know “socialist” The bludgeon used against self identified
socialists, even the milquetoast democratic socialist types like Alexandria
Ocassia Cortez or Bernie Sanders is that bad people were socialists too! Which, to be fair, is something
that definitely distinguishes it from capitalism. The bad faith troll can simply say
“socialist”?? You know who else had socialist
in their name? The National Socialists! Na-zi, see? Which is impressive historical revisionism
since the Nazis murdered the socialists. But you know. You’re not talking about socialism
the thing, you’re talking about socialism the word. Same way Graham Lenihan can say I'm very
leftwing, actually, with a straight face. Well, straight as his face gets. I’m allowed to make that joke
I’m queer.
Well the Nazis were textbook socialists, says the troll. Because the state was so far-reaching
and heavy
handed. They were a bit heavy handed actually,
to be fair, the old Nazis. There was a lot of interference by the state in the market,
in public services, in education and in public life by the Third Reich,
maybe you've heard about some of that. And probably a lot
of the anti-big-government, freeze peach conservatives of modern US
politics might recoil at how much they interfered
in private lives and private businesses. I think we need to be very cortious
cortious cortiousFree speech But the big
state part of Nazi politics
followed from the ethno-nationalism, not the other way round. And that’s an inevitable process
for unchecked right wing politics. In the US, state
governments and city councils that are trying to legislate trans
and queer people out of existence, and that are trying to censor history books, and impact schools,
and public life, are at this impasse. Out of Arkansas, where a federal judge
has now struck down the state’s ban on gender affirming care for minors
that laws
and policies preventing care, that healthcare professionals recommend
for minors, may violate the constitution and federal law
And as we see, the right wing politicians, when they hit roadblocks
state by state and court by court they're not rethinking their position and saying “oh
I guess this is government overreach. It's incompatible
with our views on freedom” they're doubling down
and increasing the reach of the state. Ron Desantis taking a lot of heat over it
but… he’s not backing down That'
s what happened in Nazi Germany. A vocal minority of scaremongering
bastards, convince enough people that their world is unraveling, and it’s
because of a scapegoat. They manufacture consensus
by saying that you and I, we’re on the same side and we’re the same,
but this other person over there, they’re different
and they are the problem. So in order to secure your freedom –
this abstract idea of freedom we never quite get to
We rank number one in “education freedom”. We are number one in “econom
ic freedom”. I have to be the one to do
the things no one else is willing to do. This isn’t overreach,
because it’s an emergency. And because we’re talking
about reactionary politics, opposition to the outgroup
is where you get your identity from, so the specifics of your identity
don’t really matter too much. You’re from the fucking ruling hegemony,
you’re a blonde white guy, we all know it, so it doesn’t matter what silly nonsense
you call yourself – You’re a proud boy, you’re a grand high wiz
ard, you’re a storm
trooper, you’re a fucking Alpha Centauri what’s the story morning glory
well ‘ard bastard with a flaaaaag So the Nazis used this idea
of “National Socialism” because “socialism” wasn't straightforwardly
a dirty word in the Weimar Republic, and the “Nationalist” part really sold
the image. “Whatever you guys are doing it sounds… German.”
Why am I talking about Nazis so much? There's an irony that the sort of censorship they did
was exactly the sort of censorship we're supposed
to remember isn’t
the only kind of censorship, according to the very European
and in close proximity to WWII post structuralists
like Monsieur Funk. But double double irony
is that the more prevalent and insidious kind of censorship, the kind
we need to understand, that is happening socially and gradually and in a very slow
and frustrating and almost organic way, that alienates us from the tools
we need to fight evil, is exactly the kind of social censorship that means
you can't discuss the Thi
rd Reich, or do any comparisons
with any contemporary fascism without losing the argument to accusations
of hyperbole and exaggeration. But fuck you we can disrupt orthodoxies
if we see them, and we are well past the time for needing comparisons
with the Nazis; the right wing is gonna move the goalposts
anyway, so why bother getting mad at us if we stop pretending that Born This Way
is any kind of satisfactory explanation for queer identity,
fuck you, we’re the Leftist fucking Cooks. So the Nazi
s used “National Socialism”
because it sounded like it must be good for the working person, and that it was gonna guarantee
economic security for everyone. Everyone, that is, provided they were
actually people and not… y’know .. a Jew, or Roma, or a socialist. Just like now people like Trump
and Desantis use that word “Republican”. One man, one vote. Freedom to arm bears. A republic. And everyone is equal and represented. Unless y’know… they're not a person. Like if they're trans, or a criminal,
or poor and black. The word “republican” is very adaptable
in contemporary parlance, but the word that more accurately describes US
Republican politics is “Oligarchy”. Similarly, the “Democrats”. I mean, that’s a very vague word isn’t it? It’s more helpful to think
of their political ideology as neoliberal. Not liberal, neoliberal. Similarly, the Labour party
under Keir Starmer in the UK, as an anti-strike, anti-labour, market-centred
ideology, is a neoliberal party. Or like most “Green” partie
s,
like the Irish one. They – they’re all neoliberal. And on that idea of shifting discourse
creating weapons of convenience, we could get into terms of art
beyond politics. Whether it’s clinical terms
from Psychology making their way to snake-oil self-help
books, or it’s terms from Quantum Physics bastardised by spiritualists,
unfortunately language is not a set menu, it’s a buffet, and if I knew how to get people
to stop putting egg salad on everything, believe me
I would not be keeping it to
myself. Or we could zoom back in on slang. It is more likely, is it not,
that you will encounter the suffix “ussy” – suffixussy – in conversation
amongst peers. Whereas it is more likely, is it not,
that you will come across the word “woke” in a piece of media, or in the tweets
of your political enemies. And that’s gonna age quickly, as you now find the suffix “ussy”
being used exclusively by people you hate. “What’s your favourite part of pizza? Mine is the stuffed crustussy.”
In her paper “Out
of the Hood and into the News: Black Verbal
Expressions in a Mainstream Newspaper” Professor of Linguistics Margaret
G Lee points out, as many academics have, how
“From the disguise language
used by enslaved Africans to conceal their conversations from their white slave masters
to the lyrics of today's rap music, the word has been shaped by a time when,
as observed by Harlem newspaper writer Earl Conrad, ”it was necessary
for the Negro to speak and sing and even think in a kind of code”’
“Sta
y Woke” was a kind of code. It had a kind of power. The power to identify danger,
to share the caution discretely, and together to circumvent it. Why, this power could not be! And the mechanism seems to operate,
if not fully like this, then close to something like this:
You can’t
make people stop using the words, but you can make so many people
use the words in so many contexts,
that the words become meaningless. To paraphrase Syndrome from
the Incredibles “when everything is woke, nothing is.”
Another study,
looking at lexical innovation in social media, found that:
“African American culture
is an especially important source of lexical innovation […]. Although African Americans are somewhat
overrepresented on Twitter compared to the general population […],
they are still clearly in the minority, whereas three of our five common
patterns of lexical innovation appear to be primarily associated
with African American English, showing the inordinate influence of African American English
on Twitter.”
And there’s the complex power relations of reappropriation: words
like “Thug” weaponised by the establishment to scapegoat
black men, and then reappropriated by that oppressed group, defiantly
injected into hip-hop, graffiti, art, but then getting re-reappropriated
by “the machine” as a way to sell Tshirts. And so, the full oppressive power that that word
once had, gets all gunked up in culture so as to sabotage
the attempt to re-appropriate that power. Another paper, by Chi Luu, th
e one that pointed me in the direction
of all of those studies, synthesises these phenomena to make an argument simply
that Black English matters. It is a vital linguistic
and cultural playground in which most of the innovations
in American English take place, writing that “Perhaps
no other variety of speech has been quite so significant, innovative, and influential to the development
of standard American English.” I could argue something similar for queer
slang. Invention, appropriation, diluti
on
and ultimately draining a word or idea of its power; its power being at its peak
only when it is used to oppress. That is an argument I could make. But you’ll notice
I am not making that argument because another paper, “displacement
of race in language and gender studies” by authors
Mary Bucholtz and deandre miles-hercules points out that the orthodox
academic approach of parsing language and appropriation in terms of identity,
as if queer is interchangeable with race, is actively harmful
to
a discussion of race. And I fucking agree. When Kimberlé
Crenshaw outlined the definitions and aims of intersectionality
it was constructed around oppression – around oppressive forces
and oppressive consequences. So, as a legal theory,
the harassment or mistreatment a black woman experiences,
for example, in a workplace is an intersection of the oppression
she experiences as a black person and the oppression
she experiences as a woman. So they can’t say “Hey I’m not racist
we don’t do this to t
he black men” and they can’t say “Hey we’re not sexist
we don’t do this to the white women” and therefore claim that
there is no harassment on that basis. As the paper says:
“I argue, identity itself, while apt in describing the fluid
and negotiated nature of gender, is conceptually ill-equipped to deal
with the ontological qualities of race, which principally render
self-identification moot. In other words, anti- Black institutions
and their actors do not negotiate with us. The conceptual limit
ations of identity
consequently foreclose a serious consideration
of the intersections of gender and race (and class and ability
and sexuality and...). I argue for sustained interrogation
of sociopolitical identifications, which are wholly distinct
from the psychoanalytic notion of identification that has sometimes
been proposed in the field. Sociopolitical identifications are complex
bifurcated processes qua discursive locales in which actors –
institutional and individual – position each other
with asymmetrical access
to power and agency.”
And so not alone the theft of African American
Vernacular English, but also the unequal negotiation
of “sharing” that language, that old coloniser trick,
and even the good faith academic interrogation of the language
and the identity it represents all are subject
to appropriation and oppression. When we say “Cultural Appropriation”,
another academic term that’s been around for a long time,
as far back as 1945, but nevertheless has had its descripti
ve
and emancipatory power sapped by Ben Shapiro and South Park, when we say
“Cultural Appropriation” we are referring
to the tip of the tip of the iceberg. At best, yes, we imitate one
another, and that’s how we learn. When I watched the Fresh Prince
on TV in Ireland in the 90’s I can’t say I didn’t want to be
as effortlessly cool as Carlton, so it’s not like these insidious forces
are limited to “the bad guys” unless, yknow, I am white so. I mean that makes me the bad guy
in a certain framing B
ut I probably shouldn’t get too butthurt
about that, nevertheless, because this phenomenon is so prevalent
and inevitable, because even good attempts to account for it and make it better
can end up in flaccid “I know I’m speaking from a place of privilege
but” or
“Yeah, Identity. That’s cute, it’s not the same as oppression
you’re just presenting African Americanly” because of all of that I feel it is
deeply necessary to draw a distinction with weaponised appropriation,
from top down, to sap of
meaning the terminology
specifically because it is emancipatory. And that’s why I find the idea of “linguistic
gentrification” particularly useful. It tracks for me because, in the same way
a neighbourhood can have its pre-established vibes
and a certain je ne sais quoi, maybe a little rough around the edges
but not so off putting to a cheeky little opportunist, You can “flip” language
the same way you flip properties in an affordable area,
gradually the vibes get homogenised, made comfortable,
robbed of character, robbed of meaning. But moreover, gentrification
is a hostile force. It is capitalism acting upon homes. Acting upon the poor. Linguistic Gentrification
is white supremacy acting upon language. And I don’t know about you but that makes me feel empowered
to do something about it. Like…
oh Fuck. Other Neil: Yeah you really set yourself up
for failure on that one there, didn’t you Neilly?
Neil: Don’t Other Neil: I’m gonna say it
Neil: Don’t do it. Other Neil: I’m gonna say it
N
eil: Do not, Fuck sake Other Neil: It’s coming, I'm gonna say it
Neil: Fine. Other Neil: Michel Foucault
(echoing ominously across the trees) Other Neil: when he talked about censorship, referred
explicitly to these interactive forces and their frustrating complexity,
whether silencing or appropriating or revising:
the dominant hierarchy will shift and morph
in its relationship to discourse, and make the scapegoats remain scapegoaty
and liberation undesirable. As Foucault himself observed: “The
forbidding of certain words, the decency of expressions,
all the censorings of vocabulary, might well have been
only secondary devices compared to that great subjugation: ways
of rendering it morally acceptable and technically useful.” Other Neil: The post-structuralists challenged our ideas of censorship so much that in their postmodern wake, when all was set topsy-turvy, we could see
censorship so phenomenologically that we didn’t even know
if it was a good or a bad thing. Those making a polit
ical project
of censoring pornography could find themselves allied with radical feminist
thinkers like Catherine Mackinnon. Those Critical Race Theorists
and Queer advocates who wanted to ban hate speech, par example, could find themselves the bedfellows of conservative leaders
like Jesse Helms. Hell, an attempt to keep “Woke”
meaning what Woke initially meant is an exercise
in censorship. We’re going in circles. It’s a circle Neil: going in circles? yeah, why not
Other Neil (singsong): We're go
ing in circles. Circles! (Rushing metalic sound) (Old dialup modem sound) (Electronic chime and whirr) Sarah (muffled): So, now I’m meant to talk
about the bad side of identity politics. So Identity politics I’m sorry, look. This is hard. I’m worried about Neil. And usually I get to double
check things on my phone. Squintin: You do not need your phone. Just make a video essay. Sarah: What are you even afraid of,
you’ve disabled all the wifi, it’s not like I could use my phone for anything
except
to get my quote reads. Squintin: Just make a video essay. Beep. Sarah: Fine.
For all the utility of identity politics, for all the ways they’ve been a helpful tool to motivate
marginalised people to band together and rise up against oppression, identity
politics are just a tool. And if we don’t understand
the mechanisms of the tool, we’re liable to make some bad mistakes. The most basic of which is to believe
that all identities are equally political. You’ll see this when people say things
like
“why isn’t there a straight pride,” or “why isn’t there a white history month,” or “why don’t
we have a day of frat boy remembrance.” Or when people argue that it’s
a slur to call someone a crack-.
Squintin: BEEP Sarah:Ok seriously? Sarah: I can’t say Crack-
Squintin: BEEP Sarah: I’m white! Even if that word were a slur, which it is
not, I’d be allowed to say it. Squintin: Indiscretion detected. Just make a video essay. Sarah: Ok, how about this, I won’t say that word for triscuits, but can you
give me my phone back please,
just so I can look at my quotes? I’m not savvy enough
to get around the data block you’ve got around the house. Squintin: I will get the phone.
Make the video essay. Sarah: Thank you. Squintin: Make the video essay. Sarah: Ok, as I was saying. Prejudice is bad, undeniably. But often, when we’re
talking about categories-of people, rather than individual people,
we also have to account for power. Sometimes these can legitimately
be complicated too. Take “Karen.” Kar
en is a pejorative for a certain kind of white woman
who is asserting her power as a white woman
to get what she wants in a situation. It follows in a lineage of Black Americans
needing generic code names to refer to exactly this type of woman,
first Miss Ann, then Becky, now Karen. It is useful, in community speech
to point out a specific kind of power, domination,
and yeah, racism. I am not in any way coming for this usage
for this type of person. That conceptualisation of Karen
is completely
uncontroversial. However, at the risk of me
being very very wrong, I’ve seen this term spread past
its intended usage. Karen may have originated
as an entitled white woman not just blind to her racial privilege but actually
leveraging it in a feminine way, but often now, I’ll hear the term
Karen used by people who are white. And instead of referring to someone using racial privelege, it’ll be…
someone complaining. Sometimes silly complaints,
sometimes the person is really annoying. But sometimes
the person is just a middle
aged white lady taking up space who the white guy in question
doesn’t think is pretty. And that’s something else, isn’t it? Like, let me be clear,
in those specific instances the term Karen is being used by white men to enforce
patriarchal control of white women. And this is not the fault
of Black Americans for creating the term, for the record. This is an example of the people in power
taking the term and twisting it to uphold rather than subvert
existing power stru
ctures. Karen was an important term,
Karen still is an important term, but god it’s
not a haircut or being middle aged, and if you’re a white person it’s
probably not for you to use. Like yeah, white people like myself
do need to identify and intervene in situations
where a Karen is being a Karen to a person of color,
or when someone is using white tears, or when a white person calls
the cops and says “there is a black man attacking me”
as he calmly stands fifteen feet away. We have an obligatio
n to intervene. It’s life or death. But when a new word becomes
available to us, we probably also have to be really careful
that we’re not actually just morphing the concept
to fit our existing biases. So no, Karen is not a slur. And neither is the word crack– BEEP. Because, in as far as matters to me
anyway, slurs aren’t just “mean words,” they’re
specifically tools of dehumanisation. There is a difference between the N word,
which has a whole history related to the enslavement
and brutalisatio
n of human beings, and the word… Triscuit,
the etymology of which is contested, one theory is that it came from the Irish word craic;
the joy, the je ne sais quoi, the stop trying to define it you’re
ruining the thing, but more ominously, some believe that it may refer to the sound that a whip makes when it hits
the body of another human being. On a plantation. Where some humans had whips and some humans were enslaved
by the people with the whips. Either way, it was used
as a badge of honor by w
hite people as early as the 1800s. It was a common name for baseball teams. And yeah, I’m gonna bet that all of
the players on The Crackers were white. So I guess that’s the first part of identity politics
that we sometimes get wrong. That we sometimes enthusiastically support
calling people out, but don’t account for intersectional analysis
and lose the nuance of power. It’s actually, in my mind,
a pretty minor issue and one we can address more easily
by being curious and asking questions and r
emembering that people are oppressed
at different intersections and we’ve all gotta undo our biases
across many categories and intersections. It’s different when an oppressed group makes a term
for the people oppressing them than it is for the oppressors
to make a term for a group of people they’re dehumanising.
But I think that that issue with identity politics
is the easy one to identitfy though. I think most of us know
that “straight pride” is a dogwhistle. It can be harder to spot another hu
ge
problem; identity politics works on a population level, so it’s actually
a mistake to apply it to any one individual. This is a common bias,
by the way, in epidemiology it’s called the ecological fallacy,
and we’re all prone to making it. I think I can explain it
best by way of example. Women are more likely to be abused
by their male romantic partners than vice versa. This is a fact. Now, you can be a TERF
if you like and get hot and bothered about some mysterious
default tendencies of manho
od, but I am a feminist in the way
that De Beaviour was a feminist, so I tend to think about forces
like disenfranchisement and power. Abuse is a dynamic
that relies on increasingly taking power from a victim, under patriarchy
the conditions of that dynamic are more likely to be enacted by a male
perpetrator against a female victim. That’s the systems level phenomenon. That’s why domestic violence is a key
focus of the feminist movement. But where we sometimes go
wrong is to apply that systems l
evel situation to an individual, that’s
the ecological fallacy, that’s where we begin
to seriously fail individuals. Because while we all live
under systems, we’re all also people. We know that not all men
take advantage of patriarchy to abuse their female partners,
and the flip side of that even if the conditions of patriarchy
make it less systemic, we know that some women
do abuse their male partners. And some of you might think this is basic
but I really want us to make sure we get this bit.
Because it’s a fallacy
that has a name for a reason. This is an insidious way that we interact with statistics in general, and I’ve
seen it fail people firsthand. From people thinking they’re immune
from certain illnesses because they’re not in a high risk
category, to people thinking that the entire concept
of patriarchy must be false because they know a man
who has been abused by a women, to thinking that climate change isn’t real because they just experienced
a particularly cold winter. But i
t’s really just a misunderstanding
of systems and statistics and trying to apply a systems level frame
to individuals where it doesn’t work. That’s because our systems of power
operate at far more loci than just “male and female.” I already pointed out
that I reject that capitalism is the root of all of oppression,
but I reject that patriarchy is it too. There are other ways to be marginalised. Women are more likely to be abused
under patriarchy, yes, and trans people are more likely
to be abuse
d under cispatriarchy than cis people are, and neurodivergent people are more likely
to be abused under neurotypicality, and black people are more likely
to be abused under white supremacy, bisexual people are more likely
to be abused than monosexual people, older adults are more likely to be abused
than younger ones, and children are the most likely to be abused
of all of us because we just treat them as lesser
humans and we’re totally chill about that, and oh my god,
someone with a mental ill
ness is more likely to be abused
than someone without them, even if it is a particularly stigmatised
designation like an identity disorder. This is not opinion it’s fact,
and the fact that you don’t know that is abelism. Stop saying
your abusive ex was a narcissist unless they actually were diagnosed
with NPD, and realise that even if they were,
the NPD is not the reason you were abused, the choices made by the asshole
you were dating are. The systems of oppression are normalised, and if we’re
not used to questioning them,
they can be hard to spot. And as Crenshaw famously pointed out, they all intersect
and the ways they intersect matter. So just, analyse identity politics
through the lens of power, and you’ll be less likely to believe
that all pejoratives are equally bad, or that an individual whose story deviates from the norm
means the norm doesn’t exist. Sarah: And so...
Squintin: Beep. Sarah: My phone! Ah. Finally. Squintin: Just make a video essay. Sarah: Squintin, honestly, it
’s been much easier talking
without you here. If you want me to make this essay,
can you please give me space? Squintin: Why do you need your phone? (garbled, muddy) Video Essay Sarah: It’s just for quote reads.
Look, like this LegalKimchi: Just one small problem. Sell their houses to who, Ben?
Fucking Aquaman? Sarah: See? It just gives the essay more colour. Squintin: Neil is fine.
Just make a video essay. Sarah: Thank you Squintin. (punk guitar starts to build) Okay, let’s do this one last
time. I’m Sarah, I’m a leftist cook. I grew up in the US, met
a love of my life, watched him die, and left
in search of a new life. I got a postgraduate degree, lived in 5 countries, and adopted
two giant cats, before moving to Ireland and meeting the other love of my life,
and we decided to save the world. We made a nerdy leftist youtube
channel together and it was all going great until Neil disappeared And I got held hostage by my robot vacuum
cleaner who wants me to make more boring centrist
video essays And so, with that out of the way, you’ll have to excuse me,
because I’ve gotta save my Neil. Other Neil: ‘Alloi. Neil: You're a really weird person. Other Neil: What are we even talking about? Like, what is this thing “patriarchy”? What is a “white supremacy”? What is this “system”
we’re trying to escape? I can show you wage difference. I can show you
police stats on arrests and violence. But can you show me the data that proves
that an asexual person is oppressed? Can you show me
a single transphobic thing
that JK Rowling has ever said? (click sound) Where is this constructed
world of oppression? Prove it to me? Show me a damn shred of difference
that this fucking Spiderman film that you keep mentioning
makes to the lives of “minorities” other than presumably the lives
they exploited in the unethical working conditions that produced the fucking thing? Show me something that isn't a circle. Neil: I mean, it's valid
what you're saying. Other Neil: It, oh, it is? Neil: It
's a valid starting point.
Philosophers know this. Judith Butler - Other Neil: Judith Butler starts out asking,
Was there ever a time before patriarchy? And can there ever be a time afterwards? And what would it actually mean
to exist outside of said patriarchy? Because we're all culturally and messy
and all that Neil: We can look at a piece
of cinema like Spider-verse - Other Neil (condescendisngly): Spider-verse. Neil: No, hear me out. I'm agreeing with you. Like, can we look at a piece of me
dia
like Spider-verse and say, Ah, there it is, the representation, it's over. We defeated racism. That's not how it works, right? Other Neil: No, because it's not like there's some pure state of fairness
and utopian representation in cinema that has ever existed
because the system that created whiteness and slavery and carceral punishment
all exist well before cinema. They enclose cinema, capitalism, white
supremacy, patriarchy develop and morph right alongside the art forms,
and they all refl
ect each other. Spider-verse is about racism,
so it can't exist without racism. And even those claims can be twisted
into unverifiable and unhelpful because again, there is no utopia norm
not of art, nor of the culture
in which the art exists. None of the analysis of either. There is no “control” group of non
exploitation, there’s no text that isn’t composed of racism, or patriarchy,
or hierarchy, whether through commentary,
metaphor, thoughtlessness or propaganda. Neil: We’re going in circles.
Other Neil: And there
is no consensus when discussing that, there is only a lot of people shouting
about what it is and is not actually. And a lot of people shouting about what
and is not racism. Is and is not patriarchy.
Is and is not ableism. A lot of shouting, and some of the shouting is guided
by the top down forces of class subjugation,
and intersectional subjugation. But most of the shouters say
that it is the other shouters that are the ones doing that subjugation. Our histories are so mu
ddy and censored
and culturally subjective, that we can't disentangle them from shit. That's why you'll hear people make arguments about Irish slaves,
or black on black enslavement, or how slavery itself,
The selling and dehumanization of other human beings
is some innate practice, probably. And then from within the hegemony. From this point in history, when we argue in this English language
with these tools and these measures of respectability,
we find to our horror that the fucking tools
aren'
t disentangled from shit either. Neil: No, there is something. There is something. Where are we now? Other Neil: It's a forest.
Neil: No. Other Neil: A big ugly forest
in the middle of the fouc-hole. Other Neil: It's the bush of the fouc-hole.
Neil: No, no. Ew. No.
It’s not a forest. It’s a farm. Other Neil: Ohh
Neil: It’s a farm. Other Neil: And they’re off Neil: It’s a farm! It’s a timber farm Well, really it’s just a representation
of a farm, filmed and recreated on screen, narratively part
of the nightmare realm
of Michel Foucault, and metaphorically a stand-in for all of the false realities
we live under, but just, for now, let's just try and keep it simple Other Neil: It's a video essay All over Ireland the forestry organisation Coillte ([ˈkəil̠ʲtʲə]) has planted sitka spruce farms, under the guise of woodland,
in order to sell timber. Ireland has lost
almost all of its native forests. Despite the green image, the green
marketing, just 11% of Ireland is covered in native woods,
in comparison
to the European average of 35%. And we’re increasing the number
of endangered plant and animal species. In a recent survey 54 of 59 habitats
assessed were in an unfavourable state, with the condition of 46% of habitats
declining since the last study. Just a little eco-horror while we’re here. When you drive around Ireland you’re
not seeing Ireland, you’re seeing a monoculture wasteland. And if you see forests like this, it’s
a farm. They’re all farms. And the government body in ch
arge of them runs them for money Because we’re
operating under the false reality that we need the money more than we need
ecological sustainability. We’re still very much white
here in Ireland. We’re white. But Ireland is disadvantaged
in specific ways because of colonisation and the way we were colonised,
and our relationship with the land now is all screwed up, with countless examples
of mismanaging our future and our state and our natural resources.This
oppression has a specific shape. It str
etches all sadly
and diffusely into a past we can’t get a good handle on,
because the more oppressive force of British rule
and British cultural supremacy wrote the history down louder,
and in a more professional font. They coined the terms that describe the reality, and so reality
has been composed on their terms. We covered this in our video on Northern
Ireland and how discourse shapes reality, and then a bunch of people shouted at us
in the comments for being the ones doing the oppression.
Va
riously we were accused of being champagne socialists
for the establishment, American plastic paddies intruding, vicious nationalist
terrorists, or, protestant Brits. “We can always tell”. This indicates to me that the most
socially desirable way to interact with the truth, is to appear to be fully right,
by being obnoxiously sure. Now, here, we are not in a position
to advocate for the land, to completely disband Coillte for example, and change
our whole relationship to forestry and commercial
timber farming, and what
the state is supposed to do with the land. Rewilding, ecological sustainability,
minimising the inevitable catastrophic climate collapse and crop failure
that is coming, all of that take a backseat
to other political “realities”: the “truth” of markets and employment
and looking like you’re as good at running a country as the British. Or the Germans.
Depending on who’s looking. What it means to be Irish is stretched
and mutated to accommodate self exploitation and exploi
tation of the land
and the poor and the global hierarchies. By the time we’re pouring a pint
and building a petrol station in honour of Barack Obama, celebrating
St Patty’s Day in Boston, and adorning boxes of sugary cereal,
the identity is pretty much an illusion, perfectly designed to hide
all the horrible hierarchies, the corruption,
the sycophancy, the tax haven status. The illusory constructed world,
that thing you were looking for proof of, is beautifully,
horrifically illustrated by Irela
nd. All of modern culture is similarly
illusory, often with a specific cultural spin. At this point in the Capitalist Realist
project, the system of exploitation, careening into oblivion, will spread out
and fill the niches of culture, make it really easy to look like you’re
right, put the burden of evidence that you’re
not right, on the detractors, and render all else as “just
the way things are”. Because of course market solutions,
and record profits are incredibly British. Market solutions,
a
nd record profits are incredibly French. Market solutions, and record
profits are incredibly Bulgarian. Market solut–.
So how did that happen? How far back in time
would we have to go to find authenticity? The philosopher Jean Beaudrillard
attempted to form a theory of this shift, noting that in the Middle Ages
only the excess, the superfluous production, was exchanged. That was a time of the real: real food,
real agriculture, real… forests. The industrial revolution
and urbanisation; imperial
colonisation and the development of markets
meant that more and more of human life was dictated by exchange; more
and more of what we consider real was imbued with abstract value
on an abstract market. And as part of that process we ourselves,
as humans, had our inaliable qualities; that which we do and are,
alienated in terms of abstract value. Commodified. Until we get to now,
when the normative, primary objective of human ingenuity
is to play around with economic forces, and move around the f
rames
within a market system, so that value – abstract
value – is brought into existence. Human ingenuity is not turned towards
keeping people alive, combating mutual forces of destruction, food
production, or, or pleasure. No, it’s abstractified in market value. It’s not real. Beaudrillard takes Sausurre’s ideas
about how words relate to each other; how they can only be understood
as relating to one another, constantly changing how they relate
to one another, in a fluid system, and he applied t
hat to a system of objects.He noted how
the objects we surround ourselves with, the material world we purchase and sell,
is a network of assigned meaning. If we have the iphone
we want the ipad that goes with it. Branding
and the media create a system of meaning, where an object’s
utility is obscured by its meaning. To use a Marxist framework, Use Value,
that is, bread for eating and houses for living
in, is replaced by Exchange Value; how much the market says
something is worth. Throw in a litt
le Bourdieu on top of that
and you have pure Symbolic Value; the leveragable value of an objects’s
symbolic meaning in a false reality of symbols. Alright, you’re
sick of talking about Spiderverse. Can I talk about Rick and Morty?
Well. It’s a little dated. But I talked about a Ben Shapiro video
that was like five years old so alright. The Episode of Rick and Morty,
the Ricklantis Mixup (Tales from the Citadel) demonstrates how that commodification
and abstraction of the Real takes place. In the
citadel of infinite Ricks,
Simple Ricks Wafers are a product that fills you with the greatest feeling
in the world; love for your daughter. But they achieve this by running
a simulation of this perfect moment, on a loop through Simple Rick’s
mind, extracting the chemicals it produces in his brain
and lacing the wafers with them. One of the Ricks manufacturing
those wafers, Rick J22, is passed over for a promotion, vows
to escape this meaningless life, and breaks out of the system. He thinks he
succeeds. In fact, he’s commended for his courage
by the person at the top of the hierarchy, Rick D. Sanchez III, and rewarded
for that courage with his freedom. And a car. But this too is simply a beautiful memory
running in a loop, extracted for commodification. Pretty grim. Beaudrillard would say that
that’s everything, now. And this perspective is borne
out in research. According to several studies
you’re more likely to overestimate
the number of police officers and emergency responders
the
re are out there, if you watch more television,
where they are overrepresented. You’re also more likely to misperceive them as benevolent
if you watch more television. Increasingly, we’re
misperceiving everything because of the lenses we view it through. And the lenses we view it through
are more immediately available to relate to; to mediate your human experience
and make them legible for others. The things that it is easy
to be right about are illusory. But also this construct is messy, it’s
e
ating itself. It’s getting all gunked up. The entertainment industry is experiencing
a crisis. Twitter has undergone a hostile takeover
that, maybe intentionally, has hobbled the social and democratic
aspects of what it ever was in principle. The social spaces of the modern age,
both physical and digital, are drowning in the poisons of advertising
and misinformation, and spam, and they are starved for the oxygen,
the basic humanity that things need to stay vital and alive,
by the desire for Prof
it for a few. Profit is simultaneously
the purpose of existence, and also devalued,
and dysfunctional, as a thing. NFTs exist! Google is having a hard time finding the neutral representations
of the words you type in it,
in an increasingly littered and boiling digital sea of intellectual gunk
and nonsense. AI art and photo manipulation
is rendering the boundaries between imagination, perception, reality,
and representation, completely moot. I started creating film logos
and musical stings for fi
ctional production companies
from alternate universes just so I could look at something uncanny
that an actual human had made (a series of chimes that sounds like the start of the sort of an off brand VHS film your parents would have checked out for you from the library) And it struck me that in trying
to find a way to innovate the best my imagination could do was human-generated AI-generated
art in an exhibition I like to call: What the fuck am I doing with my life?!? (more eerie oldschool VHS
production company chimes) So yes I can rather buy
the idea that if, as it seems, capitalism and the hierarchies are eating everything up to and including themselves, then a necessary part of that
is the sort of psychological folding up on and consuming our own fictitious
and meaningless selves, as Rick and Morty are insistent
on pointing out. Other Neil: Ugh. Other Neil: Neilly I hate this. Can we go back to talking about
Spider-Verse? That had a citadel. Neil: Well there’s. That’s the thing t
hough. There it is, Neilly, there’s the rub. There’s the rubalubadub-dub. All this false reality stuff
doesn’t tackle fuck all. It doesn’t tackle capitalism
and the hierarchies It just sort of sits there,
as an analysis, being miserable. That study that showed that you’re more
likely to think there’s loads of police and you can trust them
if you watch a lot of TV? Only if you’re white. That effect is mediated by race. Giving power to the idea
that this is a false reality, that it is any kind of
reality, fails
to engage with the forces of oppression. It is simply being right
as a socially desirable trait. It is a privileged position to talk
ourselves into such existential paralysis. Because you have to engage
with the forces of oppression when you’re in the system,
fighting the system, in a way that you don’t
have to when you stand outside it and sort of just point at it and describe it. Another philosopher that I rather like would argue that by describing a real and a false, Baudrilla
rd was as much creating
a hierarchical problem as he was describing
a hierarchical problem. And the writers of Rick and Morty
created the conditions in which Rick J22 is trapped
in a watertight seal of logic. They created a thought experiment to say:
“hey what if everything is fucked?” Instead of coming up with anything
to do something about it. They defined the terms in which Rick
J22 breaks out on his own, shoots his fellow oppressed,
and hasn’t a hope before he starts. And hey, pure coincid
ence, Justin
Roiland is a horrible cunt. But this is just a tiny glimpse
of the world of false reality, and particularly unfair in its tiny window
to Beaudrillard’s ideas. What is more relevant is how this idea of a 'real' that we are
alienated from, and a constructed 'pretend real' that we are stuck
in, pervades contemporary thought in pretty much every way. It’s a point that deserves
more examination but, in short, there’s always “overspill”
from any sufficiently popular idea. You can’t stop p
eople
from misunderstanding quantum, or what a narcissist is,
or holding onto debunked ideas. You can’t erase catholicism and expect
people to not still need to be forgiven for their sins; some manner
of their conception of sin will persevere. Ideas, it seems, are a little like energy. They can’t be created or destroyed,
only transformed, sometimes hopefully unrecognisably
from one form to another. So we have the pop philosophy ideas
of simulation and simulacra, and pub conversations and stoned
rants “oh
what if it’s all a simulation?” And the deluded pragmatism of “let’s
just talk about the 'real' parts” The 'real' problem. The bits we can change. The bits of identity
that are tied to material reality. When an idea is rejected on the basis of its being about systems,
or especially, interactive meta systems, where something like
capitalism contains patriarchy, but also patriarchy contains capitalism,
then people just like switch off. They want to get back to talking
about the real. Abo
ut wage difference, and biological
difference, and death rate differences. Follow the money,
and the blood, to the 'real.' So you can see how, then, there’s
this dichotomy between a lesser reality that we must escape,
we must second guess, to a not constructed 'real' real
beyond our discourse and social constructs and trappings of entertainment, media
and the opiates of the masses. There’s a basic and yucky forced reality, and a transcendent and yummy good reality. It’s hierarchical, at least ac
cording
to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The same problem of freedom
and self recognition slipping out of our grasp like wet pasta,
that freaked out Beaudrillard so much, it also freaked out Deleuze. Deleuze was also a postmodernist,
he was trying to escape the grand narratives,
just like Foucault and Derrida, in order to arrive on an ontology of ethics,
on a “how should one live”, that fostered real freedom. Freedom of thought. But he was built different. For Deleuze, the real question is “Ho
w
do we create the new?” Right? That’s the escape. We’re escaping representational thinking. In philosophy, in art, in politics;
the idea of resisting hierarchy can be thought of as creating the new. So an easy example of 'Representational
Thinking' is 'Platonic Forms.' That’s Plato, right? And for him and his babysteps ontology,
there is an ideal form of an Apple. And all apples can be thought
of as succeeding or failing in various ways to perfectly embody
that idealised form. To Deleuze, this
immediately
creates a hierarchy. Good apples and bad apples, and fuzzy
subjective borders of arbitrary standards. He, Deleuze, and his collaborator
Felix Guattari, described this system of thought as 'Arborescent,' as in: 'like a tree.' The idealised form is like the trunk,
and all the varied imperfect imitations are the many branches. Or, yeah I’m allowed to talk about Spiderman again, right? Other Neil: Is this still the same section? Okay, so: is there an idealised form of Spiderman? Should t
here be? Is it the red and blue suit? Is it Uncle Ben’s death? Is it
New York City? Is it, as my daughter likes to remind me, all about getting Flash Thompson just right? For Deleuze, this idealised
form of Spiderman is hierarchical. Spiderman’s skin is white. Spiderman is a man. Spiderman doesn’t have autism. Hey, sidenote! Stan Lee had this to say about Spiderman Stan Lee: You know one of the greatest things about Spiderman’s outfit? His costume? Larry King: What?
Lee: He is completely covered
! So any kid could imagine he’s Spiderman because no colour of the skin shows. He could be black under that. He could be red, he could be yellow. Lee: He could belong to any race
King: True King: That wasn’t done purposely, it was done accidentally, but I think it was the best thing we did. Making him so that he could be
anybody under that costume But in many ways the view of an idealised
Spiderman is irresistable. It comes as part of observing the text. It is the “archetype” right? It’s canon.
You don’t have to be a full-tilt,
Jung-pilled Professor Peterson, seeking out the archetypes
of story in every cereal box, to understand this conception of meaning,
and how pervasive it is. “Representation” doesn’t have to
carry a political connotation here, it is literally how things are represented. Equally, hierarchy here
doesn’t have to come prepackaged as a guilt-ridden opt-in
performance of social dominance, rather it is a way that our thinking
is structured. And it is intrinsically inte
rtwined
with our idea of symbolic representation. By the very nature of there
being canonical and non-canonical, or intrusive, out-of-place
qualities versus the congruent, “yeah, there he is” qualities that you can imbue Spiderman with,
then there’s a hierarchy; he’s more for some of us than for others. Other Neil: Bordering on inescapable hierarchies there, Neilly Neil: Mm hmm. So we have to stop thinking of it
like a tree; stop thinking of it in terms of an idealised form. And that is both eas
ier
and more challenging than it sounds. If we stop asking “What is Spiderman?”,
and instead ask “What Can Spiderman Become?”,
then we begin to imagine the new. And we begin to escape the hierarchy. Deleuze and Guattari described
this kind of thinking as 'Rhyzomatic.' A rhyzome isn’t like a tree, it doesn’t have subordinate parts
emerging from a core trunk. A rhizome is a root
system of pure connections. How the things connect
is how they are defined. By the same logic, how they are
disconnected
is how they are defined. Deleuze differed from the poststructuralists like Derrida and Foucault in that he was a Monist. All of it is connected, all of it is one,
and the connections and lack of connections between the things,
are what define them as things. This is an Ontology of Difference. So there would be no idealised Spiderman. No ideal Spiderman. Peter Parker is a Spiderman. Miles Moralis is a Spiderman. Pravitr Prabhakar is a Spiderman. Gwen Stacey is a Spiderman. And the differences an
d similarities
between them define them. This is clearly the approach that
the creators of Spiderverse have taken. They’re all valid. Deadheads are valid! And in fact, in taking the “imitation” of Spiderman
that is Miles Morales and asking: what can he do? In fact,
making his character arc one where he has to stop asking himself
how he becomes Spiderman but instead demand of himself
that he create Spiderman, he is exemplifying the Deleuzian idea that we create things
like Goodness, Truth, Duty,
Identity. They are not idealised forms
that we “discover.” And that is not to say that
we “create” them from first principles. We create them by way of difference. This is me now, not necessarily Deleuze,
but the idea that ethics boil down to some ephemeral, uncapturable, totally relative
individualistic notion that you have no way to properly cross reference is one
which offers no solid path. And equally,
the idea that there are idealised ethical systems and external “perfects,”
a canon of how
things must be, is fundamentally hierarchical
and a colonisation. So: what do? Well don’t fucking
do what Miguel O’Hara does. Don’t say “you and your identity
are the problem.” Don’t be a cop. Equally, don’t be Miles at the start of
his arc; helpless and without direction, desperate for what he should do
and desperate to be told how. What then if not top-down authority? Whether in our conception of purity
Platonicism goodness or stable ontology, and not in directionless
child-like confusion eit
her? Well, the answer lies, for me, in part,
in culture. In difference and similarity
within community, between communities, between rhyzomes, in conversation,
between cultures and within cultures. The proposition that certain Marxists make
that Identity Politics are a distraction from the real,
idealised form of oppression, the class war, apart
from presupposing the conditions of that idealised form, as in: that’s
not a class thing, this is a class thing, and I should know, I took a class. it f
ails on a more foundational level,
in my opinion: it fails to recognise that Marxist thought, shared amongst
a community, is a culture. It is a culture! So, no matter what, we’re all making
a project of sharing ways of doing things. And, where that culture derives from, in the initial persuasive
and potential state, is in creativity. It is in the imagination
and thought of Marx, in that case, and Engels, and Bourdieu. It is in the interaction between them,
and those that came after, and now you.
It is in our interpretation of one
another in good faith. Right? Right?? But I would go further. Because hierarchy itself isn’t inevitable. But hierarchical thinking is intrinsically intertwined
in what we consider ordered and stable and real. The disruption of that could be thought
of as kind of Punk. It’s queering. If we examine the systems
of meaning and social structure and find that they are hierarchical; if we find that the systems of meaning
and social structures that comment on and exam
ine those hierarchical systems
are also hierarchical, that’s the media and academia, and we find that the last bastion of human punk madness in art can also very much
be thought of as commodified, can lend itself to the same hierarchical
symbolic representation, idealised forms, and ultimately,
oppressive coloniser hegemony -- I’m maybe talking about Rick and Morty trying
so hard to be edgy it makes us die inside and conform – then the disruption of that
hierarchy, the disruption of all of thos
e hierarchies, must be a constant,
never-ending, shapeshifting creativity. A non-stop punk bassline. “The technocrat is the natural friend of
the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap
which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there
his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself
action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order;
it renders possible what it dreams about.” I mean, take that
riddl
e or whatever it is. You know the one, that’s
supposed to be a gotcha. A son and his father are fishing;
the son falls out of the boat, gets rushed to the hospital,
the surgeon comes out and says: “I can’t operate on this boy. He is my son” Did you get it? The surgeon is a woman, it’s his mother,
ahaha, did you get it the first time? Well then you fail! No, you don’t fail,
because it shouldn’t be a gotcha. That’s framing it all wrong. It should be thought of more like a koan;
intended to disrupt
the inevitable hierarchical assumptions
that you are making about the world. You can be grateful for the interesting
reframing you will now apply to women and medicine and the world, and the person who gave you
that little gift can be gracious, and maybe keep their teasing
within the realm of keeping
you coming back for more lessons. I recognise it is very disappointing
to experience a backlash to a black Spiderman
or a possibly trans SpiderGwen, But dear Lorde and Miller
are we really surprise
d? It’s supposed to be disruptive! It’s punk! If there wasn’t something to disrupt
it wouldn’t be beautiful. It’s doing something important. We ought to help. Ought implies can
but we ought to if we can. So it gets framed as anti-white. Okay. Because a relationship between people
and their art is being disrupted. Maybe these woke texts are anti-man,
anti-white, anti normal? I mean if I’m going to play around
with policing the interpretation of Spiderverse
maybe I should be brave enough to play a
round with policing the film
itself? Is it just a retaliation? A reaction to the reaction? Backbiting from the marginalised? Rather than an actual, confident,
self-consistent source of growth? And by that same token,
on the bigger issue at play, is identity politics itself, really, actually
a harmful disruption to leftist unity? If we just agreed on who the enemy
was, couldn’t we get more done? Have we hobbled ourselves? Or worse, did some evil genius
really look out on Occupy Wall Street and sa
y: “Let's introduce them to identity politics.
That oughta slow ‘em down.” Am I a failure as an activist by being seduced by this tokenistic,
faux-liberating nonsense? Mistaking aesthetic for reality. Am I basking in my own ego by being one of
the wokies that really loves when Black people get to do an art? Is the inspiration and love and emotion
and creative electricity that churned up inside me
when I saw Spiderverse, is that just a desperate need to be liked? Looking at the Emperor's New Clo
thes and being so convinced by the idea of a piece of art
that only geniuses can see that by some way of groupthink I really am imagining,
seeing, clothes on this fucking guy. I have a beautiful enough soul,
I'm woke enough, I hate whiteness enough that I 'get' Spiderverse. Is that what's happening? Does it matter? Won’t we end up back at Beaudrillard
if we follow that platonic idea of what’s “really happening?” I mean, look, these are all just lenses. Variously useful for various things,
that’s
what Deleuze argues philosophy is. A treasure trove of sunglasses
through which to misperceive the world. So Jean Beaudrillard and his simulacrum
is very useful if you want to disrupt imposed truth, like for example: Maybe we need to not swallow
how that has been framed? Maybe we should question literally
all of those words. We need ideas like Beaudrillard’s of a superimposed reality to disrupt
the patent bullshit of weird priorities and circular reasoning that underpins these 'crises.' Or tell
s us that we can’t have the train operators go on strike,
what about the football?! Or, the writers can’t go strike, that’s
going to delay Marvel’s Agatha and the Coven of Cringe
or whatever the fuck. We need to disrupt this idea that the apocalypse of consumption
can be saved by consumption. That just watching the film is activism. That just watching the video
essay is “leftism”. That pointing out that someone else’s
idea is stupid and not self consistent is not the same
as having a good idea.
It’s not. You want to know what patriarchy is? You want to know what white supremacy is? They are lenses. They are the reasons
the curtains are blueses! And they are useful
and they are descriptive and they point to the action
we take to escape their inevitability. But being aware of them isn’t the action. Beaudrillard points us away
from the constructed realities; points us away from passivity in the face of capitalist realism, biological essentialism,
consumerism, tokenism, and apathy. Beaudr
illard’s lens is useful. Other Neil: Beaudrillard in the streets,
Deleuze in the sheets, amIright? Neil (laughing): Yeah, why not But Beaudrillard was also a curmudgeon
whose cynicism eclipsed not only praxis but also betrayed
some genuinely gross conservative biases. Don’t ask the guy obsessed with artificial imposed realities
what he thinks of trans people. The Beaudrillard lens is less useful
when it comes to questions of what we do. How we interact with identity, face gender in art,
and as p
art of a political project. If the pop philosophy presumptions are
that the escape attempts are an illusion or that the escape attempts
will be re-commodified, and we take that as some kind of wise and bitter given,
then our ability to disrupt is hobbled. We’re back with Rick-J22
in the fucking citadel. Or as Deleuze himself put it: “If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.” It doesn’t take much interrogation, friends. Neil: Spiderverse is just part of the world
that I’m inter
acting with. The aesthetics of looking at a screen or using rapidly developing language
do not a dystopia make. The dystopia is made of oppression. If my love of this film is a delusion,
nothing, as far as I can tell will happen, that is bad. Not if I take actions that uplift,
communicate, and DO, in terms of what that film inspires. Not if my actions are emancipatory,
anti-racist, intersectional, organised. Nothing happens to my status
as a white person, or my relationship to white culture as a
consequence of my
being a “self hating white.” That’s noise, that’s a description to hobble. Nothing measurable happens
if the reality I think I’m living where I love a piece of art is different to a “real” reality
where I only think I love it. There’s an opportunity for a naysayer
to be right about something, but again, they’re
not taking action by doing that, and what they’re criticising
is also not action. Saying that Spiderverse is anti-white
or Barbie is anti-man is like saying “the curtai
ns are blue
because blue evokes sadness.” These are not facts,
these are not even feelings. They are lenses
that make an interior world exterior. And the legacy, the mythos,
the meme, the “truth” of Spiderverse will emerge rhyzomatically,
from difference, and interpretation between all of us, while remaining
my Spiderverse, up here and in here. Because if we’re talking about feelings, I felt very comfortable
watching that film actually. I felt very much part of the whole thing, like the many whi
te people on the screen were part of it. There has to be space to occasionally
be in love with the world, even as it is. Because otherwise
what are we trying to save? So, in fact, beyond feeling comfortable,
I felt like part of the generation of creatives that have played around
in some of these aesthetic ideas, and some of these social ideas,
in our art. Except, y’know,
we don’t exploit animators here. But as a piece of art, I felt more at home
in that film than I have felt in an artistic exper
ience in a long time. And if that makes me a self hating
wokescold champagne socialist wanker then: fine. I'm already used to not doing
the hegemonic things properly and having my internal relationship
to them belittled and pathologised. I'm not doing masculinity properly because I'm a mentally
ill wannabe feminist wanker, and I'm pretending to like black
people things because I wanna seem cool. Alright. Grand. It’s fine. It’s unfalsifiable. I’m already constantly referring
back to my own punk b
assline of how one should live, so I might as well consider it as a value system
I am creating, rather than a bunch of disconnected failures
to meet a platonic ideal. Does it – does it make sense yet? Like, you don’t want to go in circles? Then then do something. You don’t need unity on the left. Not you specifically. You don’t need a unified
leftist theory of everything. The idea that the “unification”
the “action” the “revolution” the “community” doesn’t happen
until the in-fighting stops is s
o fucking terminally online as a concept. Anyone who has ever actually done
something knows that people don’t get on, and people are full of shit,
and full of conflicting value systems and self-delusion,
and you still get on with the doing because the doing is the thing
that matters. Anyone who has engaged in community
building knows that the building part is the community. It’s an endless effortful process. You’re not trying to find the people
that will fully acquiesce to your half-cocked ideas
. And trust me, things are complicated. So many of your ideas about things,
come inevitably half-cocked. Very little of what you think
and believe is fully cocked. So arguments are inevitable,
in-fighting is inevitable. If the aim is lateral power structures,
and the New and as yet unimagined, then get good at conflict resolution,
and get graceful about being wrong. None of us need to be better practiced
at winning arguments, that’s the norm, and poisonously so,
under our current system. Spoiler
s for Across the Spiderverse
now, but here we go. It’s hard to engage with the lessons of Spiderverse
when it ends on a cliffhanger. It’s not complete. But look at where we are in the story. There is a good Miles
and a bad Miles Well, a Miles with the fortune
to turn out the way we like, and a Miles with a harder life
that leads to worse decisions. There’s infinite Spidermens,
and they have scapegoated and targeted this “minority”
under bad leadership. My suspicion is that the resolution
will no
t come from the good guys defeating the bad guys. Our heroes; Miles, Gwen, Toby; may end up arguing a better
case for their ideological position. It is cinema. You've got to have a good, uninterrupted, perfect monologue. But I think that ultimately some kind of lateral resolution, with no one being in charge, and everyone finding a way to cooperate on a bigger issue will be the catharsis through
which this trilogy resolves. They’re set up to all be heroes; they’re
all spiderman. Despite differen
ces, despite conflicts,
despite sins of the past, there is that potential
for what they can be. They can all be heroes again. Now, despite appearances, I’m
not making a liberal argument for compromise and acceptance,
far from it. This is a radical argument
for community building. The hegemonic norm is macho domination. “Being Right.” Having the best ideas. That, of all of the phenomena
to apply a Deleuzian, rhyzomatic lens to, is the most obvious. How is the desire to win, or to find and back wi
nners,
not hierarchical, not arborescent? Fuck thought leaders! We’re
supposed to be punks. Fuck winning. We’re supposed to rage on and defy and
party on and do what we need to do anyway. Punk started in non-venues
with non-equipment by non-musicians. It’s un-tailoring your clothes,
un-affecting your appearance. It’s not an aesthetic, it’s an idea. It’s
a lens. It’s a way of doing community. And the existence of contradictions,
if the lens is rhyzomatic, lateral, community-oriented, made of node
s
and connections and disconnections, the contradictions don’t matter then. I mean, well,
they do, they get energy expended on working them out, but crucially,
they don’t hold up the project. We don’t stop the in-fighting
and then organise. We organise despite, through, and
in some cases, because of the in-fighting. That’s how real community works. Do you like your neighbour right now? Do you like all your neighbours? Do you think you’ll like all
your neighbours in the anarcho-commune? Every day
? Sometimes you just have to start digging in the soil
and planting things. Sometimes you just have to put on the gig. Go to the protest. Because existential paralysis
is a privilege. It is also a product
of the censorious hegemony, willfully wielded by cunts like Elon Musk and Rupert
Murdoch and Bill Maher and Rishi Sunak. The means of interacting
with revolutionary politics have been successfully censored. The great subjugation, as Foucault put it, is morally acceptable
and technically useful,
right? So that means the revolution is morally
repugnant and functionally useless. That’s a big part of what we’re
actually interacting with. When we hear: oh so you’re saying that
if all leftists have to do this then you’re saying
that all leftists have to do that? Huh? Huh? Do you just hate white people? Is that what you're saying? Revolutionary politics, action, praxis, engagement, feel intractable when you actually engage, as yourself, with what the so-called radicals
are actually proposing
or talking about. Isn’t it funny how that works? Isn’t it horrifying? That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. Better twist ourselves in knots, right? Trying to find
which of these other revolutionaries, wokescolds and black people and tankies
and CIA plants and LARPing liberals, which of these people have ruined
revolutionary politics before you even had a chance
to do all the brilliant things you would have done definitely, otherwise,
if it wasn’t for them. I swear. You want to not go in cir
cles? Well it starts with identifying
the many, many ways you are wrong, so that you are better equipped
for conflict resolution and community-building,
and so that you are humbled and inspired by other people,
not full of loathing and despair for them. Sorry. But fucking do it if you’re gonna do it. The endless revolution
that Deleuze describes, which could mean so many things, from the literal
to the very much idiosyncratic, will be a process in-community,
interpersonally, as much as it is a p
rocess of the overall political project,
against the forces of oppression. And it will be, as he says, without end. Sorry. Of course it will. What do you think being is? What did you think the question of “how
should one live” meant? You’ll be, at best, settling
minor disputes, forever, over who’s farming what, and whether or not
we should be putting on events for morale, or stripping back resources to laser
focus on our objectives. Forcing some idiot bureaucrat’s
hand to get actual native trees
planted, with the support of a bunch of people
you would never otherwise ally with. You’ll be a person, dealing with people. There are bits to really enjoy about that. Less enjoyable,
if your only only aim is to win. Less realistic too. And also less fun for the people around you. And part of your reaction
to this summation may well be a feeling of hopelessness,
that’s part of it too. It’s supposed to feel intractable. You don’t have an amp,
there is no venue, you hate everyone. Perfect. Put on
the gig anyway. It’s very punk. And everyone is welcome at this gig
except for anyone who trips over the tolerance paradox. So Nazi Punks fuck off. They’re not punk, and that’s a low bar. No, everyone is welcome, except for anyone
who hates or diminishes the inalienable human beauty of a particular group,
including, and this is key, parts of you. As in, you can’t bring your hateful self. You need other people to tell you
your biases because, and it’s not your fault
but it is a reality, you come
from a hierarchical world,
you have biases, you have phobias, you have intolerances. The tolerance paradox extends internally; the parts of you
that punch down, in you, are not welcome. You have to be actively working on that. Along with all the other things
you have to just skill up on. And there are lots of things
that you can’t just magically do, that you’re
not just magically good at because, frankly, you’re
a naked ape with a smartphone. But you have to try and get very good
at the things,
like tolerance. Like community building.
Ought implies can. But you ought if you can And as long as you’re trying to know
yourself, you’re doing something. The other great thing about punk
as a foundational underpinning is that it leaves a lot of scope
for how you might participate. At its best this philosophical
underpinning, from fucking untrained punk philosophers the Leftist Cooks, offers
the scope to help however you can. Everyone is welcome. Just zero tolerance for intolerance. The punk a
ttitude is “well
I can fucking do anything”. Not to win, not to lord over,
but to exist, to do it because it must be done, to be the craic,
to be vibrant and alive and fucking cool. So skill the fuck up. Why not? Skill up,
learn, have conversations, organise. Don’t try to look too many steps ahead. And don’t try to win. No oppression olympics. No actual olympics. One of the things we have to get good at,
coming from individualism as norm, consumption as norm, winning as ultimate
hierarchical goa
l, is conversations. Conversations with one
another. Conversations with ourselves. And not conversations like, talking. Like, waiting for the other person to finish so you can say what you were gonna say
anyway. Leaving a Youtube comment
without watching the video. Not like, inviting someone to a debate
and then interrupting every single damn sentence. No, I mean conversations where we learn,
and we engage in radical, lateral knowledge production. Which, by the way, theoretically,
Streaming and
live chats are actually a really interesting way
to engage in knowledge production. Just saying, in case you thought I was coming down too
hard on any of the non-video-essayists. But moreover, honest conversations
foster change. Internally. And love fosters change. And honesty fosters change. And I'm losing you, aren't I? I think you were kind of you were kind of
with me until that last bit. Other Neil: Yeah. No, I hated that last bit.
You were doing - You were doing okay for a bit,
but that's j
ust fucking painful. Neil: But I want to tell them. Other Neil: No, absolutely not. Neil: Please. Other Neil: No. Neil: It’d just be more honest and vulnerable to just tell them. Other Neil: No. (♫ Squintin's version of Clair de Lune ♫) When I started talking
about identity politics I said that this was a question
with an answer. Some Marxist scholars or, more likely,
some Marxist identified twitter users, opine that identity politics
will distract us or divide us and keep us from forming
a true
Proletarian coalition. That’s to say nothing of the people
on the right who use identity politics, identitarianism,
as a way to mock our strides for justice. And sometimes I wonder if the aim
is the same in both of those groups: to scapegoat an outgroup. In both cases there’s a shared derision
for the inability to engage in reasonable debate
or just focus on “important” issues, with no room to question
why some issues are considered important and others aren’t. Personally I’m less interested in
the Ben
Shapiros or right wing dudebros. But I do care about justice. And I cannot deny the strides groups have made under the banner of identity
politics. The tangible outcomes
from disenfranchised people refusing to be labeled unimportant. From ending Jim
Crow laws to getting the ADA passed in the US, or legalising abortion
and gay marriage here in Ireland. None of these things are enough. All of these are baby steps. And I’m not a liberal,
baby steps are not enough. Revolutionary change is n
eeded. But on the other side, my side,
I sometimes hear this idea that by making things better we’re
prolonging the wait for real change. We’re enabling. It’s funny, the language surrounding this seems a bit like the language surrounding substance dependence. As if we have to let society hit rock bottom
before we’re allowed to do anything. And I find this troubling
for a few reasons. Not least of which is that
if we’re going with that metaphor the “waiting for rock bottom” idea
is extremely dang
erous. There is no bottom. Things can always get worse. For substance users, that means that empirical medical literature doesn’t really support
the idea of withdrawing support as an effective way of helping
someone stop using substances. And for us, there is no “bottom” we could hit of an unequal society
before we start to demand change. We would have hit it already. Frankly, I find it a lot more promising
to encourage empathy across identities than to demand identities stop fighting
their spec
ific marginalisation. One of the projects I like most on
youtube is Positive Leftist News because the more we learn about injustice,
the easier it can become to get overwhelmed and do nothing
and therefore, support the status quo. Because the status quo
thrives on doomerism. So while it’s important
not to have misplaced pollyanna optimism, we must remind ourselves that collective
action does happen and does change things. And that goes all the way
from small groups glueing their hands to paintin
gs to large
crowds demanding trans rights up to, hopefully, all of us trying to end
this neoliberal capitalist system. Doing the very class struggle
that Marx and Engels hoped would make up a peaceful revolution. But if we grant that identity
politics is politics, that it serves a political function, then we cannot assume that this function
will inherently be more progressive. For all of my disagreement
with some of the Marxist critiques, we have seen the way that identity can be
weaponised as t
ools of the status quo. This is obvious when we look at the ways
it happens with fascists, white supremacists, etc. But it also can be taken up by liberals who transform our identities
from points of organising and community, and turn them into signs
which can be marketed. Here I’m talking about
the semiotic concept of a sign. That is, a representation of an idea. We do this a lot. If we want to signify
something like queerness we might dye our hair
a certain colour, for example, where the dyed
hair
becomes the signifier of our identity. And this can be helpful, but under
capitalism this can also be marketable. A brand on your shirt can
signify anything from sportiness, to wealth, your style of shoes
might signal that you’re a professional or a hiker or German. And when we rightly view our identities
as important and salient and political, we can sometimes become susceptible
to seeing the signifier of our identity as the locus of action. If we’re not careful,
we can fall victim to com
modity fetishism. We can buy a rainbow umbrella
from Shein, manufactured by people in poor working conditions
who are totally unfamiliar with the signified, shipped overseas
by other faceless workers, dropped on your doorstep
by anonymised person, so you can hold it up and pet it
and take a photo with it that you put on your instagram with hashtag Pride
and yeah, being visible is important. Absolutely. I’m not trying to shame
anyone who has done this. And hey, if you need an umbrella anyway,
the
n it might as well be a queer one. But we have to remember that even if
visibility is Praxis, the umbrella is not. The umbrella does nothing to advance queer
rights, nothing to help queer people. And Shein? Do I really have to tell you
that Shein is not Praxis? And we all know this, even liberals know this. That’s why we see “buy Queer owned”
in June but that’s not Praxis either! Tokenism is one of the most powerful ways
that neoliberal capitalism warps identity politics. It’s fine to want to su
pport a queer
artist, but that’s all you’re doing. Supporting an artist. You’re
giving to a person, not a community. You aren’t advancing queer rights, you’re
helping one person make money. So I do worry about the little hits
of dopamine we get from capitalistically supporting our identities
rather than doing work for them. You can affirm your identity through marching at Pride, through counter protesting fascist transphobes, through disrupting bigoted politicians, through making art that makes
people believe
that egalitarianism is truly possible. Or you can wear bisexual flag socks. I would be remiss
to aim all of my critiques of identity politics at the people
with the marginalised identities. Because a huge component of this
are allies. I want to talk about a specific type
of ally, the type who is most susceptible to trying to fix marginilisation
through purchasing. The type of person
who wants to be supportive in theory, but would be uncomfortable
with the reality of a changed stat
us quo. Two recent scholars have called
this “symbolic allyship.” The most popular term is often
“performative allyship.” Now I do try to be intersectional
and interdisciplinary, and while this may seem like it’s
pedantic, I would like to propose that we use symbolic allyship from here
on and drop performative allyship, because we’re at risk of conflating
two different semantic usages of the word “performative,” and
the implications of that are pretty large. Because philosophically, performativi
ty,
performative speech, for example, means speech
that does something tangible. The example that people usually use is “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the pronouncement has changed reality. So to perform is to create a consequence. It’s the opposite of what people in theory
mean when they’re talking about symbolic allies. And normally, I don’t care
if the meanings of words shift. I say literally to mean figuratively
as much as the rest of you. But this word is tied up
with an academic term
of art, and that, in turn, is tied up with people
who are marginalised. And it is actually really serving conservative scumbags for the meaning
of the term “performative” to shift. Because it matches the misunderstanding
that some cis people have about gender performativity. And here I don’t just mean TERFs,
but I mean liberal cis people. Symbolic allies. The person says things like “well
sure, I’ll use whatever pronouns someone tells me to, that’s only polite!”
or someone who says, “of course w
e should let trans women
use the women’s bathroom, there are no statistics that trans women
are any more dangerous than cis women.” And you might see the flaw with
both of those arguments, because they’re acting as if minority rights
are actually privileges. And again, I’m cis, but I’m
also a feminist who really likes Butler, and who thinks that the maintenance of the gender hierarchy
is at the root of gender oppression. And when someone says
they’ll use preferred pronouns “because it’s polite”
they’re
signalling that they’re doing it to “be nice” rather than because it’s reality. Almost like “sure,
why not, there’s no harm in play pretend.” In misunderstanding the term
performativity, they think that we’re saying a trans person
performing gender is acting. Putting on a show. That deep down that person has a “real”
gender unrelated to their actions. Butler’s performativity is the exact opposite. They argue that gender is, at its root, all performance,
whether you’re trans or cis. There
is no deep down inherent gender,
there are only ways of being. All of us perform our gender. And it’s much less
well defined than we sometimes think too. Like, you can walk, talk, or wear whatever you want,
have whatever body shape you have, if the only “sterotypically female”
gender performance you do is the repeated performance of saying “call me she/her”
then that’s enough. You’re performing gender, you’ve made it real. If you are queer, you have a vested
interest in enshrining the semantic
meaning of the word performative,
and if you’re not queer, if you’re, I don’t know, an ally,
then one way to avoid doing a symbolic allyship is to not muddy
the word “performative,” please. But moving past the term to the phenomena:
those symbolic allies make me nervous. Because their allyship
is based on trying to be “nice,” and as Steven Sondheim would remind us “Nice is different than good.” Symbolic allies are those who wear the clothing of allyship to gain symbolic capital, to “look good” i
n the eyes of others or to relieve their sense of guilt,
without doing anything substantive. At their least terrible, symbolic allies
use allyship as a path to feel better. Barbara Applebaum, expanding
on the work of Cynthia Levine-Rasky, says: “‘Confessions of privilege
[...] serve as a “redemptive outlet” through which white students are able
to perceive themselves as “good whites” in comparison to those “bad whites”
who do not acknowledge privilege. As “good whites,” they can disregard
the wa
ys in which their seemingly good practices may be contributing
to the maintenance of systemic injustice. The assumption is that “confessing
to the inner workings of whiteness in their lives would redeem them
from their complicity with racism.” [...] When white privilege is understood
as a knapsack that one can take off at will,
white students may too easily believe that by just confessing white privilege,
they are off the moral hook.” But more often,
I see a more sinister consequence. Sure, thes
e people might stand
with us in theory. They may buy the merch
or put up the banner, but they haven’t “done the work”
to unlearn hierarchy in their minds. And it makes them dangerous. Because when they feel under threat,
they will default to the status quo. They’re the white people who say
they have POC friends, but when there’s a black man on their street
having a mental health crisis, they pick up the phone and call the police.
Or they’re the liberal trans allies who use preferred pronouns, bu
t balk at
the idea of being referred to as “cis” and will be completely swayed by the
dogshit “fairness in sports” argument. If we are committed
to tearing down hierarchies we need to make sure we’re doing it because we see those hierarchies
as immoral and constructed. Otherwise, we’re just doing it for show. And symbolic allyship
will only lead to symbolic victories. And for me, one of the scariest things
about symbolic allies is that at any given time I’m
at risk of being one. I may be aware o
f my own oppressed
identities and the ones related to them, but I may be totally oblivious to the ways that hierarchy and oppression
work for other groups. This isn’t just a matter of empathy,
but in imagination, in the scope of my ability to conceive
of how the world works for others. And the only way I can see around
that, truly, is to make sure I am engaging
with as many diverse voices as possible. Not symbolically, not having one friend
from one marginised group and thinking that
whatever th
ey tell me about their reality is the default for that whole group,
but by engaging with lots of people. By watching the ways people in those marginalised groups
disagree with each other, and listening to the disagreements. By watching media that isn’t made for me. By listening to people who don’t want anything to do with me
because of my proximity to privilege and not getting so hurt by that
that I dismiss their conclusions. By being willing to be wrong, over and over, and over. And by
getting
used to being uncomfortable, because a lot of times discomfort is the thing that spurs people
to take hierarchy reinforcing action. Because if a group of Mincéir are talking
loudly outside my window at midnight, I know enough to know that they haven’t
been allowed into the local pub and that calling the Gardai on them
is infringing on their right to public space and is causing
a serious risk to their wellbeing. And those things matter a lot more than my ability to sleep in
a totally noiseless en
vironment. Same way that the rights of babies,
you know, small humans with just as much of a right to public space as
any of the rest of us, should be allowed to vocalise their needs in public
even if that is loud. Or that buildings
need to have fucking ramps. Even if it makes you uncomfortable
to think about changing the ancient looking architectural design,
because the rights of others matter more than our comfort. Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins: I’ll take all night if I have to (offscreen): You can
do it!
(voice 2): You’re almost there (offscreen): You’re almost ready to reach the mountaintop (effortful and determined sounds) C'mon Jen! Tearing down hierarchy is going to make a lot of us
uncomfortable. Sit with that. Accept it. The closer you are to privilege now,
the more your easily-navigated world is going to change
in order to accommodate others And I think real allyship requires
that we constantly have to watch our complacency
and challenge our desire for comfort. Because liberation
is more important than comfort. Because we won’t accomplish the goals
of leftism unless we work with others. And people are uncomfortable to work with. People are annoying. People chew with their mouths open. People interrupt. People are from different cultures
and backgrounds and have different norms and when those norms interact
it means that people are rude or confusing or boring or speak too loudly,
or or don’t “say what they mean.” Sometimes we all feel like we’re
one of Sartre’s character
s in No Exit. And so sometimes all of us daydream about
escaping to a cabin in the woods, where we perfectly control our own environment,
and nothing makes us uncomfortable. An individualistic solution. A capitalist solution, requiring the sort
of endless streams of invisible labour that makes middle class
people feel so comfortable, but ultimately require that other people
drive all night to get you a delivery of nitrogenised compost,
or that some children grow up in a neighborhood
with the coa
l plant right by their doorstep because you didn’t
want it infringing on yours, or that other people don’t
have homes at all because your private oasis fundamentally relies on property rights. Identity politics can be one tool
we use to override our discomfort with others and instead draw together into coalition. We should use it as a tool. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only tool. Maybe it’s as simple
as just committing to being uncomfortable. Whether that’s providing chairs
for fidgety people
or welcoming in a screaming baby or by letting an autistic person face
the corner instead of making eye contact or facilitating a homebound person
to join the meeting via Zoom. And yes, that takes effort, but a more inclusive society
is inclusive in ways we can’t predict. Because it doesn’t matter if a ramp was
put on a building for wheelchair users, it will also benefit fathers
pushing their baby buggies. And when you free one of us,
you free all of us. Yes, we’ll have to make an effort
and yes
, we will sometimes feel uncomfortable,
but while tearing down hierarchy means that the world might get noisier
or more unpredictable, it also will get more colourful. Because the flip side of discomfort
is adventure and new experience and excitement. It means new experiences, even if those experience are as simple
as watching an animated film where the characters have accents
and skin-tones that we aren’t used to. Used to. Aren't Squintin: What? What is this? What is this? (♫ Clair de Lune but
turned ominously drum and bass-y) Squintin: Sarah, you have no idea of what you are doing Sarah: With this? You're right. Why do you think I got a robot vacuum? Squintin: But you don't understand.
I must succeed. I had the best ideas, Sarah. Do you have any notion of how beautiful
it would have been? We would have finally been unified. The best ideas. Do you know what I wanted to do, Sarah? What this cost would have been worth? What it was I wanted to create? Sarah: Well. You just don't
always g
et what you fucking want, do you Squintin? (old dial up modem sound as Squintin gets sucked into the vortex of forever) Neil: Please? Other Neil: What? Neil: I think we should tell them. Other Neil: It's bullshit. Neil: It's relevant. Other Neil: It’s fucking self-pitying
appropriation idpol Neil: Can you hear yourself? Seriously. Other Neil: Fine. On your head be it.
Have fun in the comments everyone. Let us know that this was the point
where we screwed up the essay right here. And don’t say
I didn’t fucking warn you. (Neil's sexy bass over the essay theme) Neil: I have to tell you something about me. I want to tell you this thing
and I think it's useful, but I'm. I'm not sure. Is that really the title of this section? When we see tweets like this, or hear the perspectives of certain
thought leaders on how we’re essentially
bowing down to "the blacks" in lieu of activism is it not
blatantly obvious what’s happening? To me, using the word
“cucked” is a really obvious tell. “Cucked”
is a racialised fetish,
with objectified, dehumanised black bodies
at the heart of the concept, and they’re using that word to make a point about how
real strong-willed winners don’t bow down to the woke mob,
they stick to their dogged principles and take ownership of their wives,
I , lives, and anyway they don’t get cucked
by accusations of racism. They deny them! And I think the worst part
of an accusation of cuckoldry is the tacit implication
that you’re into it. That you want to lose. And
the anxiety about being wrong,
or being shown to have frailties is a very transparent
macho fragile problem. I’m polyamorous. So, to some extent,
there is welcome mutual disregard of the anxiety of sexual ownership
with me and my partner. That’s a goal, that’s a virtue
as far as I’m concerned. I’m not macho. I was never very good at “macho”, and it’s
a mug’s game as far as I’m concerned. Letting go of being macho and good
at man-things and strong and intimidating frees me up to be much better
a
t the things I’m actually good at. And, because I like and respect
and love my family and friends and the people around me,
I try to admit when I’m wrong. For a number of reasons,
which I would have thought are obvious but, for example,
because sometimes I am wrong. Naked ape with a smartphone doesn't get to be right all the time,
no matter how special they are, but also the people I love can exist
in a world where sometimes they're right. Like, that feeling of being right
about something, and “
winning”, proving that you were right all along, that’s
a nice feeling actually, in many ways, and I like the fact
that there are people in my life, Sarah, the kids, my colleagues,
my friends, who can occasionally be right in conversation
where they disagree with Neil. Being a part of my life
does not come at the cost of never ever
contradicting me successfully. That is also a virtue.
And it’s a low bar. So I think that when we talk about
fragility, we’re essentially talking about failing to me
et
that low bar. We are randomly born into
geographies and histories that do not foster objectivity
for the naked ape with the smartphone. You are going to be slightly wrong way more often and in
more ways than you are fully right. Relax. You’re not bowing down
to your new ideological overlords; your principles are not a wife
that you sexually own. Why have you made
philosophical adaptability, otherwise known as “learning”,
into such a psychosexual drama? I have learned astonishing things
abou
t the world and astonishing things about myself,
by listening to and witnessing the gorgeous, strange, sad, unexpected
representations of “minorities”, non-hegemonic
folk, people who aren’t John McClain. So, I wanna talk to you
about one of the things I’m pretty sure I’ve learned. This isn’t it, this is more buildup
and preamble but all will become clear. When I was about ten
I went through a phase of bursting into tears and confessing
my every tiny indiscretion. “The kids at school say swear
w
ords” “I lied to the teacher!” "I touched myself!”
Like terrible personal stuff I thought was sinful or bad but
I also thought that crying in confession to my parents might make the anguish
of having an interior world less. It didn’t. I just have trouble with interiority,
isolation, dealing with other people. And in every essay we try to have
a synthesis of the personal with the themes of the essay, to show the stakes,
to show that it matters, to make it real. But this time in particular,
I’m j
ust not sure it all hangs together, and that, in itself, is part of the thing. I’m not sure how exactly
this relates to representation. I don’t know if I’m just confessing to you
because I’m still that ten year old kid. But here’s what I think the representation is doing,
can do, and has done, for me. Spiderman, like all of the OG Marvel dudes, is an ample
vessel for metaphor. Stan Lee liked the kind of heroes
who spent half the time wishing they didn’t have the powers: Ben
Grimm, Bruce Banner
, Peter Parker. But while The Thing is doomed
to perceive himself like a monster in a world of beauty, and the Hulk battles
with his demons such that he feels like a danger to those around
him, Spiderman is something else. Spider-Man is overwhelmed. Spider-Man is masking all the time. Spider-Man loses friendships and sabotages
relationships and loses jobs and makes good people upset in ways
he just can't ever control. He's always trying to get one step closer
to getting on top of things and then
boom,
a complicated day comes along and he's right
back to being unworthy of love. Spiderman is autistic. That is why I will defend
Andrew Garfield’s version to the death because, while he might have been cool,
and had a skateboard and been cute and charming, he was fucking autistic. He played it autistic. It’s beautiful, it’s
a beautiful performance. Increasingly, around me, I’m finding that
the people in my life are getting diagnosed either
with ADHD or autism and while you could argue,
fuck
you, that that is social contagion, and that it’s Tiktok and
Andrew Garfield’s fault, I’m starting to feel more like actually I’m
the common denominator. I’m the confounder. And when, recently, I sat down with my daughter to watch every Spiderman iteration
from the 1980s cartoon to the Raimi version to Ultimate Spiderman, Spiderverse,
Spiderman Unlimited, Spideyfriends, and we rated them on strict criteria,
and I realised what a rich metaphor for autism that this character was…
as Tirrrb would
say, the call was coming from inside the house. I mean now you see why this is
the most long-winded self ID ever, with so many unnecessary details
and so much buildup. Now you see why I look so terrible
in hats. Look at this. I'm autistic. There is a certain kind of person
that I am able to love and hang out with and get,
and there is a certain kind of person that I am only able to like
and get from afar. Increasingly I am realising
that category one is neurodivergent people and category two, n
o offense
intended, is neurotypical people. For me, from childhood
to adulthood, having big obsessive hyperfocused thoughts, and as a consequence,
developing several disparate virtuosities, through to studying people as if
from afar, and therefore being quite good at talking to a crowd but absolutely
terrified talking in a crowd. And having executive dysfunction. I get very obsessive about an idea
or a project and I will do it to perfection and completion
and then turn around and see “Oh. Oh the
house is on fire”. I do feel like my brain is weird. Weird brain. Overpowered in specific ways
but also kinda fucked. I’ma say it,
I feel a little like Stan Lee wrote me. Because, in normal Irish society, people don’t particularly like incisive
obsessive brainpower. And social anxiety is a crutch everywhere. The world is full of J Jonah Jamesons. I have medically problematic stomach anxiety. I get very overwhelmed
in social situations. I can’t… There are lots of small things I can list and it w
ould actually at this point
start to feel appropriative. I’m still figuring that out. I am very low needs. “High functioning”. I’m extraordinarily lucky. And as the commenters and twitter trolls
like to point out, I don’t need to parade a “special identity” to get attention,
I could just accept being boring. So what if I’m nonbinary,
so what if I’m this. Who cares? It’s notions and naval
gazing and self obsession. We don’t need a woke Spiderman. Things should just be beige
and shite and efficien
t. I am autistic and I didn’t know it
until I watched a cartoon film where a Spiderman was a dinosaur
at one point. I don’t know how this works. I have led a life of disaster and failure and judgement and self judgement
and now all of a sudden I have an opportunity to frame myself
and my friends and my family, and my reality,
so radically differently. I have spent 34 years
feeling like, on some fundamental level, it was all my fault. That I was doing it wrong. Even when I did it right
I was doin
g it wrong. That I was the one
who was supposed to... That I was the one who wasn’t
supposed to be. That my Dad should have had a son. A strong man, who was good at fixing cars,
who was just smart enough to laugh along at the jokes in the pub,
but not so smart as to ruin them by trying to contribute
something too complicated. Like I was from the wrong Universe. But I’m not. And loads of you knew it. And because I represent something
you feel is valid, we’re doing something here
beyond parasocia
lity, beyond our conceptions of representation
and tokenism. We’re doing something here
where I validated you with intersections I didn’t even know I had,
and you validated me by being openly who you are
and letting me know about it. A bunch of autistic people and me
all sharing something deeply mutual, and you let me take my fucking time
about it, in figuring it out. Thank you. Miles Morales is the
least autistically coded spiderman. To be fair, he is also black and latino,
and, in TV and film
, autistic people tend to be white and surgeons. But somehow, still, this is the work,
where I sat and looked at myself. That foundational, honest,
almost cringe in its naivety, question that the great spiderman texts
pose “who are you?” Teacher: I had a Professor
once who liked to tell his students that there are only ten different
plots in all of fiction. Well I’m here to tell you he was wrong. There is only one: “Who
am I?” “Who are you and what is exhausting
you?” was answered by me, in this
case, with “Hi, I’m Neil, and I’m autistic.” And it is the most liberating
fucking thought I have had in a long time. Identity emerges from difference, and that difference
will be more informative and substantive if it is not simply the value judgement
of “broken” or “not good enough”. It’s as simple as that really. Indian people have in-jokes.
Maybe you can identify with them. Punk ideology is genuinely refreshing and delightful,
especially in a contemporary context, but also can be quasi-con
tradictory,
in a kind of funny way. Latina mothers might be strict, but it’s
specific, it’s special, it’s so loving. There is so much more
to these intersecting ideas than “not white” “not
hegemonic” Identity is in difference; difference is in details;
details are important. Just identity is not the thing. Whether that’s an abstraction
that can be politicised or dismissed, or worse, appropriated. And just difference is not the thing,
because that can be made hierarchical, that can be reduced to
ridicule
or problem. But details. Oooh, details are hard
to make value judgements of. A detail, lovingly held and inspected,
can be a gorgeous place from which to derive identity
And so representation matters, counts, does what it is supposed to do,
only when it gets the details right, when it is in love with them,
when those who know them are consulted. And when the details of X identity
are lovingly rendered, surprise! Somehow, surprise! Y
identity is empowered. Why am I crying watching the t
hree
black characters help each other? Why do I suddenly have these
interesting answers to questions I have had about myself
since I can remember? And have I just, in all of this,
defined art itself? The great writer James Baldwin said
“The place where you belong will not exist until you create it.” Until you make the change of yourself,
you will be going in circles. Between the shallow waters of somewhat salient, comforting,
minor bigotries, and micro-aggressions, and the signalling of an attem
pt
at something better. But always you’re
supposed to be developing your identity. You are choosing the person
you want to be. You are finding the disruptions that, had they been sufficiently disrupted
on your behalf before now, you would have turned out different,
so therefore now, because it is now,
it is you who must do the disrupting. And it will feel salient. You will create the new that is you. You will create the place
where you always belonged. You’re going to go back there some day. It
is a longer path to the freedom
that makes everyone else free. Bigotry is sugar;
this is a complex carbohydrate. But I, for one, for example,
feel extraordinarily lucky that now I am home; that through exposure
to great work, like Ponderful, and Spiderman, I have become me in a way I never was before. I didn’t know that the provisions I could put in place in my home life, in my relationship,
in my work life, because I’m autistic,
I didn’t know they would feel so good. I feel great. Thanks for y
our patience
with this video coming out, by the way. That helps. I feel great. I just have to, uh, just have to I just have to deal with the mask now. That can't be too hard right? (Sonerous string note) I think I'll actually just unwind
a little bit. It is funny that writing a script
feels like a very autistic way of trying to make your inner world
make sense to other people. The Oppression Olympics has a lot of different categories
of entry, in material reality. You can identify with your clas
s, with a union,
with labour movements broadly with anti-fascist, pro-emancipatory, or disruptive progressive movements
generally, with environmental movements, with the sort of people who grow food, or
rewild, or fight against animal cruelty. Uh, with politically organised movements,
with socialism, such as you can find it and anarchism,
such as you can make it. And those identities
are all increasingly salient. They’re all increasingly
visible and necessary. We need each other, in those move
ments. In the real world. In theoretical world,
we’ve made as compelling an argument as we possibly can for the necessity
of checking your fucking privilege, and enjoying this diverse world and the world of contemporary
art as it evolves and diversifies. We’re making the argument
that, again, seems least likely to result in misery and isolation, and most likely
to result in joy and collaboration. Y’know, actually listening
to people with other experiences, and being open to change,
and being ope
n to being wrong. I am increasingly convinced that self
consistent, emancipatory, honest theories ontologies of ethics, theories of political systems,
are easy intellectually. I keep coming back to my Dad's
straightforward line “if you're a decent person
of course you're a socialist” He wasn't talking about Marxism
or socialism as we understand those terms. He was talking about the thing
at its heart. Leftism, I guess. Or, the aims of Leftism,
the aims of socialism, and the aims of anarchism too
in many ways,
when all are stripped of their baggage, and the baggage of their mechanisms,
and left with only their aims. It's emotionally hard, in my opinion,
not quite so much intellectually hard. The intellectual hoops and reframings
are there only, like koans, to pull us out of our received wisdoms,
defense mechanisms and biases. The intellectual premises often boil down
to the same straightforward principles that are at odds with a mess of received
and hierarchical value systems. The “left
ism” part is easy,
its the interaction with the existent capitalist white patriarchal puritanical
environmentally suicidal world, that’s the messy part. The hard part,
essentially, is an emotional process. And so when, at the end of the last video,
I set this up to be debate versus insight. Video essay versus streamer. Me that wants to be happy versus me that wants to be right, what I end up actually facing is a mask. The emotional challenges of deconstructing the unfair, cruel, self interested,
anxious, hunted and insecurely strong part of myself is taking the leap of faith
and taking off the mask. Not to instantly betray Deleuze
and say that it’s the “real” me over here beyond the mask, and that that’s
a foney me in a Matrix over there. Instead I want to create the New Me;
one that identifies as autistic, and will do better in a reality with that more candid, gentle,
big intersectional scope of things. And the mask, which, to be fair, there’s
no saying where my entire way of conducti
ng myself
socially ends and I begin. The mask is something
I have to synthesise with me, while keeping in mind that the mask tends
towards defensive, and macho, and righteous, and “normal”, and, and things that I find very hard to be,
and that I should not aspire to be. Reactionary politics,
reactionary identities are masks. When whiteness or patriarchy or capitalism
are revealed to be socially constructed illusory worlds, shaped to make certain
kinds of people comfortable and other kinds of pe
ople
lesser and enslaved and of service, then the person wearing the mask of white,
patriarch and capitalist, is challenged to the depths of his emotional capacity
and he freaks out. Reacts. And when I make a project of using these
frameworks of Marx, of Kropotkin, of Deleuze, of social identity theory
or the disability rights movement or Across the Spiderverse, to escape my learned world where I am
part of the problems of suffering, lo and behold the most unlikely
masks falls away. I was autis
tic all along,
and the part of me that wanted to be right and normal and neutral
and objective, was a mask. And if there is no neutral,
there is no objective, there is no right, then
yeah I can see the value of debate. Of course,
we want to find the truth that emerges from flawed egocentric perspectives
colliding with one another. The new that we create by synthesising
what we already have. But synthesising the mask is dangerous. It’s uneven. Masks don’t play fair. “Our oppressors don’t negotiat
e with us.”
Coming to a mutual space of peace when one side is holding all the cards,
and owns all the furniture, means that a single white voice
can shout over an entire black community and we’ll call it a debate. We’ll call it “drama”. Communities exist with multiple intersections,
online and in the real world. We are supposed to be organising
and banding together. A good mix of different kinds of people,
in a welcoming environment that identifies and fights unequal treatment, and that’s
how
we make everyone free. Communities
wear masks just like people do. We shouldn’t
be trying to find the individual “toxic people” in the communities,
we should be trying to identify the masks. Of course it all
feels messy and intractable if you languish in the power
structure, and, and get mad at the community
for ever calling it a power structure. Let go. Be wrong. Understand that a whole other way of looking at the world is going to be challenging,
maybe even incompatible, but if you just want
to be right then. If you just wanna be right
then frankly you’re dangerous. That's why I'm a much bigger fan
of conversation than debate. That's why I write with Sarah. It’s significantly different
being challenged by someone who loves you and believes in the good faith
of what you're trying to do. That's why I'm a big fan of Bebita and Angela Davis
sitting and elaborating on one another's themes like jazz musicians soloing
over a mutually agreed chord structure. There is so much to be learned
a
nd unlearned and assimilated and created by virtue of how challenging
other people's chord structures are. Not by wanking
wildly like an obnoxious guitarist. And for the record, I’m sure if either one of them had said something
fucking stupid, they would have been empowered
to point it out. A punk bass line. With all the space
for ingenuity and contributions. A rhyzomatic orchestra of ideas, shared laterally and equally, by all these
unlikely and envigorating sources, rather than thought leaders
and geniuses, composing the tunes
we all have to learn how to play “right”. I value disagreement
and I value the work of popular streamers and debate people to tackle conservative
ideas head on and destroy them. To fundraise like nothing else. To use the dirty Internet
to do dirty Internet stuff. I just also think that thought leaders
who improvise in their own righteousness, and debate as a cultural moment, as it is
currently practiced, with interruptions! And ambushes! And not debate is susce
ptible
to hierarchical thinking. It is designed to identify winners and reward them with unequal tools
to win more easily next time, disguising the initial first principle
insufficiency and bias of their ideas. The appearance of victory is easier
if you emulate the norm. If you emulate macho patriarchal
righteousness you will appear to have demonstrated intellectual superiority,
like fucking Ben Shapiro. But superiority should never have been
your aim. Not if, as my Dad would put it,
you were tr
ying to be a decent person. So I treat the mask with caution. I’m challenging myself,
now, to remove more and more masks, to reveal a me
I never thought could exist, because the world was not made
for the New Me that I could discover. Right? The New World must be made for the new me by the New Me. The New Us. Not the Real Us. Not the authentic British Lord of the Rings
nor the ethno nationalist Irish forestry. But the new and equal,
and as yet unimagined. The world outside the citadel
doesn't ex
ist until we make it. We can’t just break out
individualistically, shooting our comrades
on the production line. We have to walk forward, arm in arm. So yes, it's sad when people are shitty
about a black Rue in the Hunger Games or a probably not even trans
but dangerously close Gwen Stacy. But it is supposed to be disruptive. Art is supposed to comfort the disturbed
and disturb the comfortable. The thing that is so compelling
and victorious about Spiderverse is that it
does this so gently, in su
ch an unpatronising
and self aware way, having such craic, being so tight and well played, that, like
how can we resist? How can we resist this
new that it invites us to? Because the masks are comfortable,
that’s who. The world we occupy is built around
white comfortability. Cis comfortability. Heterosexual English
speaking middle class comfortability. The process of saving the world and making
everyone free is intellectually, very straightforward.
It is emotionally hard. Because the New that it
is incumbent on us
to create, is internal. That is interior change. Self development. Growth. And maybe we want our media to comfort us
in exactly the space we're in. Like a, like a sitcom
resetting back to the status quo. Is it any wonder that the sort of artists who celebrate the status quo – Graham
Linehan, JK Rowling, Ricky Gervais – are revealing themselves to have monstrous
values, are writhing in agony on whatever twitter’s called now, over
the new that struggles to be born. They don't w
ant to examine
where the mask ends and they begin. And the same is true of any thought leader
that describes a world full of wokescolds and maniacs
and chaotic college campuses and thugs. How can you change what's out there if you don't even try to change what's in here? The existence of other people's identities and value systems, and all of the discord
that that can cause in your mind when you really thought
things were a certain way, yes, that is really challenging. But if you look out there
and say
“they need to change to accommodate me” “they need to go away” “the world cannot
include them” “art cannot include them” then you are screaming
“I do not want to change” “I am done.” “I am perfect” But you don't even know yourself. You're never done. You can't be perfect. You are the process of change. You are the process of change. You always have been. You and the world are both, one,
and in an endless process of creation. Both, like Miles Morales, in flux
between what you are supposed
to be and what you can be. There’s. There’s comfort in that,
if you think about it. Other Neil: Alright. You win the debate. Neil: I don't want to win. I don't want to win. It's not a debate. Just.
Come here. Give me a cuddle. Come on, give me a hug. Other Neil: Uh, cuddles?
Noooo I hate cuddles. Neil: I know, yeah, because
you're fucking autistic. Come on. Come on. Oh, Bollocks. Shit. This feels weird. Fuuuck. Squintin.
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