Mikhail Remizov. Apology for bias

Apology for bias
Notes from the week.

Mikhail Remizov

Publication date: January 11, 2002

The landscape of the world is inherently uneven; life is woven from asymmetries and scars; society is a set of mobile hierarchical positions. So why on earth should we “smooth out” and artificially unify all this through the perverted communication standard of “political correctness”?

The glossy emasculation of the politically correct picture of the world is akin to Wittgenstein’s experience of the impossibility of “walking on perfectly smooth ice.” The best thing to do in the realm of a perfect surface is to fall and laugh. It is all the more remarkable that the main form of the presence of “political correctness” in Russian everyday life is laughter : secret and open, betraying us completely. And it’s not just that something in us doesn’t want to take the “seriousness of the topic” seriously. It’s just that this laughter, like any other, presupposes the hidden work of some agency of the real. And in our case, “reality,” whether we like it or not, is a convention associated with the culture of the “majority.” That is, essentially, just with culture - without any “sub” and “counter”: in general, without any parasitic prefixes. Laughter forms mutual responsibility precisely because it indirectly points to the moral reality that binds us: the reality of morals. Just as you cannot share your laughter with a schizophrenic, you cannot share it with a “politically correct person.” "Jokes are inappropriate here." Otherwise, both would step on alien soil, on the soil of the obviously repressive group authenticity of the life world .

In a word, “political correctness” in its complete form seems to me to be an ontologically subversive practice, a strategy for the deconstruction of reality. First of all, because every reality requires and presupposes its own subject: its user, its master - its “inner man”. This feature of the lifeworld is extremely clear in the case of technology. No matter how much you build paths for wheelchairs, our technical universe is still a projection of a healthy body. His web is woven around a very specific anthropological structure. A very specific human type, supposed to be normal, looms here from every corner. There is no problem in seeing hidden discrimination (in relation to people/"creatures" with different basic parameters) in all aspects of the functioning of this world. But the possibility of this discrimination can be eliminated only in one way: by destroying it. The situation is exactly the same with the symbolic constitution of cultural worlds.

Somewhere at the dawn of the 17th century, a European was seriously surprised to discover that if he created his god with a long face and a gray beard, this did not prevent the African from creating him blackened and curly. The European did not have the courage to accept this “discovery” with all the appropriate ontological tact, and he turned it into an instrument of educational satire. "Political correctness" in a sense only completes what the Enlightenment began: the deconstruction of that great force of bias that creates the vital basis of culture. Culture is a cult. And cult requires idols (no matter what monotheism thinks) - that is, representations of the sacred based on anthropological projection. And altars - that is, restricted spaces based on repressive discrimination. Equality here is obviously inappropriate: only a baptized man (need it be explained that he is “heterosexual”?) with his head uncovered is appropriate.

This connection with the dominant anthropological type covers, of course, not only the area of ​​the sacred, but in general any cell, any fragment of the cultural picture of the world, which, like a picture with a reverse perspective, is grouped in the focus of the dominant gaze directed at us. Belonging to a culture consists of identifying yourself with this human type implanted in the culture and looking at you. Be it the notorious WASP or a black man filled with totemic charisma. To each his own world.

So is it necessary to explain that our world - from the inside of our children's fairy tales, adult novels, table melodies, church practices, historical parables - looks at us in a special way. He looks at us with blue eyes . The only way to be politically correct is to punch them out.

Unfortunately, it is much easier to gouge out the eyes of your world under the auspices of “tolerance” than to eliminate its “politically incorrect” technical infrastructure. In addition, if we imagine (in the manner of science fiction) an honest attempt to adapt the technical space of a person to the needs (and psychology) of his disabled people (I’m not talking about aliens yet), then it probably will not destroy the original space of the “healthy person”, but will simply complicate it extremely, creating on a common piece of earth matrices of existence differentiated from each other. On the contrary, an attempt to “equip” the symbolic field of culture in a similar way is obviously unable to give “to each his own,” but can only level it out .

“Multiculturalism” as a project for the equal coexistence of differences is essentially a project for their abolition. When school curriculum compilers apologize to students for the low self-awareness of authors (and eras) who did not depict a single suffragette or homosexual among their heroes, or when the invisible hand of Hollywood paints its canvases according to strictly distributed quotas for all colors - black, white, green, orange , pink... - in all these cases, “political correctness” creates a new symbolic reality, where not so much “all the flowers will bloom,” but rather they will all wither together. This cultural world is as monological as all the worlds condemned by it. The only difference is that it atones for its coercion with its lifelessness.