Phony Multivocality as Real Cowardice
I´m a little late to Julian´s also-belated take on the German paper that ran a headline about the White House as “Uncle Barack´s Cabin,” but one element of the story is worth belaboring. Consider:
the editor’s attempt at a defense—while bolstering the “obliviousness” theory—is incredibly lame:
Editors at Taz defended their decision to run the headline on Thursday. “The headline is intended to be satirical,” deputy editor-in-chief Reiner Metzger told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ is a book that all Germans know and which they associate with issues of racism. The headline is supposed to make people think about these stereotypes. It works on many levels.”
He said that the issue of race surrounds Obama in the presidential election campaign. “The fact that he is African-American plays a constant role in the campaign, but no one talks about it explicitly. One can play with that fact.”
There is a grand gulf between doing satire and relying on the mystical power of caricature to ´work on many levels.´In rhetoric jargon, multivocality is the ability to speak, or the act of speaking, to various audiences simultaneously. Herr Metzger here can´t even dress up his actions in that fancy drag — because there´s also a huge difference between crafting speech aimed at more than one sort of listener at the same time and dashing off speech designed to excuse itself by claiming some kind of panoptic perspectival neutrality. Nothing could be further from pointed satire than a portrayal which is intended to be immune from criticism because it purports to possibly mean an indeterminate number of different things to an indeterminate number of people. This phony multivocality is real cowardice.
Indeed, it´s a major problem outside of Germany, too. In the US, militant moral relativism became a chic attitude many years ago in the US, but the overheated tempo of the frantic posturing it required became pretty uncool in a culture more interested in letting things slide. A strange counterpoint to our longstanding authenticity fetish, phony multivocality permits us to evade responsibility even for things we say and do authentically. We´re just ´putting things out there´, expressing ourselves in the moment, going with what works. It´s an ideology of whatever seems like a good idea at the time. It transpires that anything, maybe, works, and since we can´t know ahead of time, we can´t be held accountable for trying. Who knows? Maybe putting Obama in Uncle Tom´s Cabin would strike a lot of people as funny and insightful! Maybe there are so many different ways such a little gem of expressiveness could be interpreted that…judgment is impossible!
Yes, there´s a brave aim for cutting commentary. And a brave aim no less for art (hey, those feces are a sign of worship!) or for personal conduct. Or, Madame Clinton, for politics. But this is all the easily predictable consequence of a culture in which facts are embarrassments and impediments because facts imply inescapable standards of judgment. Perhaps we can tolerate ´value-neutral´facts, like scientific data points that permit us to ´nudge´statistical populations kept graciously anonymous. But we find it so much more difficult to tolerate facts teeming with values and values teeming with facts. To put a comfortable distance between facts and values — and given our desire to always be able to take our values seriously and unseriously at whim — we want to play with our facts, too. Or, even better, like Herr Metzger, we want our facts to — play with themselves. To the extent that we´re forced to associate ourselves with our questionable claims and commitments at all, we can revert to the oracular, disembodied style of Late Nixonia: “one can play with that fact” is the post-Clintonian, 21st-century update of “mistakes were made.”