Political correctness as "politeness without politeness", the internet as the reality of fiction and the anti-resistance attitude

 

I: ON POLITENESS

 

            Slavoj Zizek often makes a point about how commodities in capitalism are constantly taking the “substance” or “essence” out of themselves: we have beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, soda without sugar… But the point about (political) ideology is that it is able to infect precisely the most seemingly “apolitical” aspects of our lives, presenting itself as “objective”, “neutral”, “standard practice”, “universal”, “inevitable”, “obvious”, “apolitical”, “unbiased” and so on (when it is not so). Hence the commodification of our daily lives goes way beyond the goods & services market, and we can speak even of a commodification of our very social interactions, relationships and forms of communication: love, sex, friendship, politeness, and other seemingly “apolitical” aspects of our lives become commodities to be bought and sold and thus conform to the very same rules of the market.

            Hence why we can speak of “taking the essence out of the product” even in those before-enumerated social behaviors. In the case of politeness, I believe that the “political correctness” practiced by today’s Western left-liberals is the best example of a sort of “politeness without politeness”.

            What characterizes politeness is precisely the expectation for you to do something without you being “technically” forced to do it. In social norms involving manners and politeness, there is always an element of absurdity, nonsense or contradiction, there is something which “does not work” (in Lacanian psychoanalysis: “surplus-enjoyment”, the “objet petit a”). In other words, it has no “pragmatic” purpose and cannot be subjected to rationalization and over-intellectualization as to “why” we are doing it – we are dealing here with empty gestures and performances. For example, I may ask how your day was, but you are not supposed to actually answer the question, you are supposed reply that you are doing fine and ask me in return.

            Or, like Zizek’s often-repeated example:

 

“What we are dealing with here is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation that is proper to human speech. In academia, a polite way to say that we found our colleague's intervention or talk stupid and boring is to say: 'It was interesting. ' So if instead we tell our colleague openly: 'It was boring and stupid', he will be fully entitled to feel surprised and to ask: 'But if you found it boring and stupid, why didn't you simply say that it was interesting?' The unfortunate colleague is right to take the direct statement as involving something more, not only a comment about the quality of his paper but an attack on his very person.”

(Slavoj Zizek, “How to read Lacan”, Chapter 1: Empty gestures and performances)

 

            Despite the lack of a seemingly direct pragmatic value, politeness is still characterized by a few main traits: the rules of social etiquette are first and foremost unwritten rules. They are “unofficial” (in Lacanian psychoanalysis: the “big Other” does not understand them). This has a certain impact on freedom. On one hand, you could say that you are indirectly forced to reply in a certain way, and thus you only have apparent freedom, thus being even worse than a set of written rules because not only do you have to obey them, but you are also not allowed to complain (recall Zizek’s anecdote about the postmodern authoritarian father who manipulates his child into visiting his grandmother by telling him “You know how much your grandmother loves you, despite this, you should only visit her if you want to…”). From this perspective, we would be tempted to abandon unwritten rules altogether and choose the written ones as superior. Yet, there is an advantage to unwritten rules because you are now given two additional freedoms:

1.     The freedom to remain silent

2.     The freedom to offend

In regards to the former, we can recall Lacan’s famous quota that “the name of the father conceals desire”. That is, if I do not want to be close to my neighbor who is a stranger, I can resort to politeness in order to keep in touch “at a distance” and not need to actually tell them how I am feeling. How I actually feel that day is none of my neighbor’s business, and therefore I do not need to tell him, having politeness (a “honest lie”) as a way to replace the actual honest answer.

Secondly, unwritten rules give you the freedom to offend, precisely because breaking them can cause so much trouble. In the exceptional cases where such “formal” forms of verbal violence are needed in a social encounter, one can intentionally break an unwritten social norm in order to create a form of surplus-enjoyment (which can range from “sexual tension” to “passive-aggressiveness” to full-blown verbal violence).

 

II: POLITICALLY CORRECT “VENTING”

 

Political correctness is the “de-essentialized” form of politeness. It is everything that we know about politeness, but in actual written form. By “written rules” I do not refer necessarily to rules that are actually written somewhere on a piece of paper, but something that can be named explicitly into the letter of the law (ex: something that can be said out loud and understood “logically”, something that a group can be instructed to act upon, etc.). Everything that we know about an “organic” and “natural” form of friendliness and “being nice” is taken out of politeness and is transformed into political correctness, which is a cold, lifeless and tightly-controlled version of it. It is the language that “takes the life out of life”, to quote George Carlin.

We already have so many examples of “political” political correctness, but it may surprise you that this western-liberal appropriation of politeness infects even the most seemingly “apolitical” aspects of our lives: sexuality, dating advice, relationship advice, socialization, etc. We could ironically call it “apolitical correctness”.

The best example I can think of right now is a trend I’ve seen practiced not only on some Discord servers, but also given as relationship/marriage advice: the giving of cards of a certain color in order to indicate what response you want from the other. The logic is this: I can come to my spouse/partner (or to a Discord channel) venting about a specific personal problem I have. According to the logic of political correctness, I should also show them (for instance) a red card if I am looking for concrete advice, a green card if I am looking for consolation/empathy and a blue card if I just want them to listen without responding.

Certain Discord servers I’ve been in have implemented features similar to this as well, where you say in advance (through a certain color/emoji/etc.) whether you are looking for advice or just emotional support, while other servers have implemented altogether different channels for this purpose: a venting channel where you ask for advice, a venting channel where you ask for consolation, a venting channel where other people cannot answer you but only listen to you and “react” to your message using emojis/stickers/etc…

This logic seems innocent at first: what is wrong with communicating your desires? But taking the logic to the extreme takes us in a deadlock: if I come to you with a question, and also tell you in advance what answer to give me, then I take away your freedom to respond. In an “organic” and “natural” conversation, I may come to you with a problem, and you right now have the freedom to choose yourself whether you want to give me advice, consolation, or to be listened to, including the freedom to offend me. By giving you a question and also telling you in advance what (type of) answer you should give me, I have just annihilated the other person, putting them in the position of a lifeless object – in other words, I am not talking to you, but talking to myself through you.

In a more extreme example: imagine I am giving you a question but also telling you what answer you should give me. This immature mode of social interaction is the one of the psychotically structured subject, who has not passed yet through the Oedipus complex and is still stuck in the mirror stage, endlessly looking at their image in the mirror, thus talking to themselves even when talking to others…

Hence, this seemingly “psychotic” appropriation of politeness views social interaction and communication less as a game of chess with another person and more like a game of chess with yourself. The other has less and less freedom to choose their own answer, they are told in advance what to say, and the entire communication is a lifeless following of a pre-written script.

The subtle message of political correctness is clear: authoritarianism under the mask of tolerance. According to the logic of political correctness, in order for us to have “tolerance”, “empathy”, to “avoid misunderstanding and miscommunication” and to not “offend” others, we require strict rules and tightly-controlled regulative measures.

 

III: POLITICALLY CORRECT SEX AND THE ANTI-RESISTANCE ATTITUDE

 

As I previously stated in my article about the politicization of sexuality, the “woke” politically correct liberals have a contradictory attitude towards sex. On one hand, communication must be explicit: they often talk about sex as if it’s just some random any other thing, like you can go to random strangers and ask them “Do you want to have sexual intercourse with me? If yes, sign this document.” – they often talk about how we should be less ashamed when talking about sexuality, how we should just talk about it as if it’s any other topic. They present sexual communication as a logical business-transaction: consent is always explicit, “yes means yes”, there is no such thing as “implicit” sexual consent, etc. On the other hand, they are the exact same people who are extremely sensitive to sexual harassment, interpreting even the slightest open expression of sexual desire as “verbal sexual harassment” or somehow offensive (example: https://archive.is/2023.03.08-185355/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/08/men-scotland-who-loudly-boast-sexual-conquests-public-could/). Under the ideology of political correctness, men are pulled in two opposite directions: on one hand, a man should be an autistic subject who speaks his mind directly and interprets every social situation literally. On the other hand, he should be a mind-reader who is extremely careful with what he says.

Conservative-reactionary ideology does the exact same thing, but instead of pushing the limits of verbal communication, they are pushing the limits of visual communication (clothing, how much skin you show, etc.): thus, for conservatives, a woman is dragged in two opposite directions as she shall be both a sexual-object and a holy virgin (but that is a topic for another article, we are focusing on liberals now).

We need to take this logic further in a Hegelian way: it is not that progressives and conservatives each contradict themselves in their own way, and therefore, they are simply wrong. No, they stand for the contradiction as such. Communication itself is contradictory (as we know from Lacan, Hegel, etc.) and each political camp is trying to push the limits of the already pre-existing gaps inside language itself (with “woke” progressives focusing on verbal communication, through words).

This idea is inherently tied to the idea of resistance in psychoanalysis. We often speak of psychological distance and resistance as inversely proportional. In the beginning stages of a relationship (with strangers, distant friends and acquittances, someone who you just started dating, etc.) there is an increase in resistance: in this mode of social functioning, one is careful about what one says, we think before we speak, we play social situations like a game of chess, we are careful about how we come off to others, in other words, we put a lot more effort into putting on a mask. This can manifest itself as shyness, anxiety, introversion, “inhibition” or simply being more logically calculated in your speech. With people who we are “close” with, there is less resistance: we think less before we speak, we express our desires more openly, etc.

Inside even the most seemingly “apolitical” spheres of social interaction and communication infected by political correctness, you cannot help but notice a very violent attitude towards resistance. Resistance is perceived as evil, and you must be open and honest even with strangers who you just met for a few days: “be yourself”, “express yourself”, “communicate efficiently”. This idea is inherently related not only to the category of psychosis, but also that of autism. What we used to call “indirect communication” related to politeness was the predominantly praised form of communication in both academic and pop-psychology, and people who weren’t able to “read people”, understand “contextual cues” or “read between the lines” were marked as having symptoms of autism. The anti-resistance attitude is subtly dialectically reversing this attitude: literal and “direct” (autistic) speech is the only “healthy” way to communicate, anything else and it means that “you have a toxic attachment style that has not allowed you to openly express your wishes in childhood which now makes you resort to subtle manipulations and tricks” (example).

Under the perspective of historical materialism (“Marxism”) we might ask, what precisely in the material conditions has created this politically correct form of communication? We must avoid the reactionary attitude of thinking that these are just a bunch of bad ideas people have that spread like a virus – there is something inherent in the structural conditions inside society itself that create such ideologies.

One hypothesis is the increased use in the internet. When we go “offline”, we are in the fiction of reality. When we go “online”, we are in the reality of fiction. Going “online” is akin to falling asleep and dreaming, and thus internet culture (everything from memes to Discord servers to social media to popular dating advice) must be symbolically interpreted as a dream. Inside Freud’s dream interpretation, only the things that are not “in their place” must be analyzed: if you dream that the grass is green, that usually does not mean much. If you dream that the grass is blue, that is something “nonsensical” and thus it may mean something. Then, is the popular attitude that is violent towards resistance a symbolic manifestation of the underlying pain caused by the alienation of the internet? Like I said in my article about the internet, long-distance communication breaks down the dichotomy of “people who you’re close with” vs. “people who you’re distant with”. Or like Stephen Grosz said in his discussion with Slavoj Zizek: we have a public self, a public private self and a private private self.

What we must understand is that our online lives and are offline lives are not separated but alienated. Hence, they are communicating “from a distance”, and whenever real-life social interaction is presented online, its lacks are presented in symbolic/metaphorical form. The internet is the reality of fiction: whatever is repressed in real-life we do online. When we go online, we “temporarily forget” the unwritten rules of social-life interaction only to remember them back when we go offline again. I am not making a simple argument that “the internet makes us autistic”, in fact, the internet makes you look autistic in real-life, you temporarily become “autistic” only to gain back your social skills when you close off your computer (just like when you fall asleep, you temporarily forget how reality works, only to remember again when you become awake).

This is how fantasy works in psychoanalysis: it is the filter through which we view reality. Fantasy is tied to abstraction: if I am playing a game, I am “role-playing” about the rules of reality itself. Let’s say I am playing a video game like League of Legends: I may say something like “I will respawn in thirty seconds after I die”. Thus, while playing the game, I am entering fantasy: I “temporarily forget” that you cannot respawn after you die, only to “remember again” that death is forever after I close the game. The catch here is that I actually know that I am “temporarily forgetting” the rules of death. However, when we go online, we most often do not realize: we “temporarily forget” the rules of unwritten communication and we also forget that we forget.

Let me give an example of how this can happen without the internet, in order to make it simpler: more than a dozen years ago, Dave Chapelle made a video about the “love contract”, thus predicting the liberal invention of “the consent form”. The consent form is the idea that you must sign a contract before having sex in order to have explicit consent (it looks to me like an autistic over-rationalization of social interaction). It is the most extreme example of “lifeless” and “soulless” politically correct communication. There was a comment on a Youtube video related to consent forms that “this is how Sex Ed teachers think that sex happens”. It is true that Sex Ed teachers often talk about consent as if you can just go up to random strangers and ask them in the most logical and robotic way to ask them to have sexual intercourse with you. But the catch here is not that the Sex Ed teacher “doesn’t know” how “sex works”, it is that they temporarily forget, only to later remember back again if they were to be put in an actual real-life situation. The Sex Ed teacher creates an imaginary reality in their mind with its own rules, a simulated reality created just for the purposes of teaching the class, and are describing the rules of sex in this abstraction itself. When the Sex Ed teacher finishes the class and is put in another real-life situation involving sex, they will create another mental abstraction of reality with different rules. In other words, they “temporarily forget”, and most often they also “forget that they forget” only to later remember back again. It is here that Sigmund Freud becomes the most relevant: it is no wonder that he assigned sexual meanings to most dreams (“all dreams are about sex, other than sexual dreams, which are about power”) – since talking about sex to other people follows the exact same rules as falling asleep and dreaming (“temporary forgetfulness of the rules of reality”).

This is what we must keep in mind whenever you hear someone having a heated argument about sex ed, consent, sexual harassment and so on (especially if it’s online).

Slavoj Zizek perfectly pointed out in his article about “consent unicorns” the same tendency I previously noted in all political correctness:

 

“I must confess that I don’t want even to imagine such a place. Remember we are talking about having (intimate, sexualised) fun, and the implication of Mahdawi’s claim is that, in today’s society, the consent required for pure fun can only be enforced through tight control – the stricter the control over us is, the more fun everyone can have. (…) The idea of consenticorns is problematic for two interconnected reasons. First, it offers to resolve the problem of non-consensual sex by way of delegating the responsibility to an external hired controller: I can remain the way I am, the consenticorn will take care of me if I go too far.”

 

In other words, political correctness is authoritarianism under the mask of tolerance, its message (as we saw with “venting” Discord channels, as well) is that in order to be “tolerant” and to keep “peace”, we need strict authoritarian control.

The message regarding consent, as I noted in my article about the politicization of sexuality, is always contradictory, however. It follows the super-ego structure of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. That is, if you have no resistance and no inhibitions (“direct communication”), you are accused of sexual harassment. If you have resistance and inhibitions (“indirect communication”) then you are accused of rape because you didn’t ask for explicit “yes means yes” consent. The super-ego is that moralizing agency in our psyche that gives us contradictory or impossible demands just to laugh in our face that we can’t meet them. Political moralization always takes the place of the super-ego, regardless of whether it’s liberal political correctness or conservative religious moralism: there is no way to please it, it is a game that is doomed from the start, there is no way to win. Freud correctly noted how the more we obey the super-ego’s demands, the guiltier we feel. The super-ego’s purpose is pure sadistic torture. Hence, the “anti-resistance” attitude of “open and honest communication” is almost always a trap, a double-bind, and the people who promote it are ”temporarily forgetting” (repressing) the other side of the dialectic.

And in fact the dialectic is exactly the master-slave dialectic defined by Hegel more than two centuries ago! You openly express your desire, and you reduce the other person to the status of an object, regressing into a psychotically structured form of communication where you are “talking to yourself through the other” (or as Hegel put it: “you gain monopoly over self-consciousness”, you “kill the other”). You conceal your desire, and now the other person has freedom to answer, but has no way of knowing what you want, they must guess and read your mind. We are always stuck in this dialectic of power, it is a “self-defeating negation” in Hegelian language. Political correctness is a symptom of capitalism’s treatment of the master-slave dialectic (“each person communicates their desire and then they exchange part-objects like a business contract”).

We have noted down beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, soda without sugar and “politeness without politeness”. Maybe it’s time to add “socialization without social skills” as another commodity to be bought and sold, as the (pretend-to-be) desired form of communication nowadays?

Again, I must repeat to not treat contradictory (political) demands in the reactionary or “Petersonian” paradigm that if you contradict yourself, it simply means you are wrong and I am right and I won the argument (and “owned the libs”). Yes, liberals do not know what they want in terms of verbal communication (how much desire you show), just like conservatives don’t know for visual communication (how much skin you show). But this is precisely because they are pushing the limits of an already-existing contradiction inside reality as such. Like Zizek says in this video about the green vest protests, people who come with contradictory demands have reached a deadlock/impasse of the already-existing system (“we want higher pensions but lower taxes, we want better ecology but less tax on carbon”). Their demands are impossible, but only under the current economic system. The man who invented the car said that people have been demanding cars before, but under “coded” language, because they asked for “a horse that eats less but runs faster”. That was obviously an impossibility or a contradiction, but it is precisely the concept of “car” that is neither a horse than runs faster nor a horse that eats less, but something that somehow meets the needs of both (in Hegelian language: the sublation of the dialectic). This makes us wonder: are we perhaps reaching the limits of language itself in capitalism? Will the internet, and further digitalization (virtual reality, holograms, etc.) develop an altogether new system of social communication that will end up satisfying both sides of these dialectically contradictory demands of political correctness?