Appearance, Obscenity, and Ideological Prohibitions

In this order of appearances, prohibitions themselves are prohibited. In Stalin’s time, it was prohibited not only to criticize Stalin but also to publicly announce this prohibition. Is it not similar in the case of Peng Shuai? What we get from official sources is not even a clear denial—something like: “Zhang Gaoli never sexually molested Peng Shuai”—instead, we get erasure, and at best, denial of something that is not clearly stated, only referred to as “that rumor,” or “what people are talking about.”

In today’s populist West, we seem to find ourselves at the opposite extreme. Traditionally (or in our retroactive view of tradition, at least), shameless obscenity worked subversively, undermining traditional domination and depriving the Master of their false dignity. I remember from my own youth how protesting students liked to use obscene words or gestures to embarrass figures of power and, so they claimed, denounce their hypocrisy. However, today’s explosion of public obscenity is not causing the authority or Master figures to disappear; rather, it is resulting in their forceful reappearance. We are getting something that was unimaginable decades ago: obscene Masters.

But this obscenity is counterbalanced by the politically correct discourse in which, as in Stalinism, “prohibitions themselves are prohibited”—when something is erased, one does not want to admit that it was done for ideological reasons, so a more neutral reason is given. On September 5, 2021, the Guardian published a long interview with Judith Butler. Less than two days later, a part of the interview—in which Butler called trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) “fascists”—disappeared and in its place there was a note: “This article was edited on September 7, 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place.” No specifications of how some new incident could problematize Butler’s principled answer were given. Clearly the article was censored due to TERF pressure, but this reason had to be concealed because it would give rise to allegations of ideological censorship.

The choice between fidelity to appearances and public obscenity is a difficult one, and the stakes are very high. But it is ultimately a false choice: Both sides are wrong. They both came out of the disintegration of the social big Other, the set of customs and values that determines the basic features of decency in our social contracts. When the big Other disintegrates, the choice is between obscenity and enforced group terror. In the famous passage of Immanuel Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” he opposes the “public” and the “private” use of reason. Private is not one’s individual space as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification, while public is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one’s reason. This is why Kant’s formula of Enlightenment is neither “Don’t obey, think freely!” nor “Don’t obey, think and rebel!” but “Think freely, state your thoughts publicly, and obey!” The same holds for vaccine skeptics: Debate, publish your doubts, but obey regulations once the public authority imposes them. Without practical consensus we will slowly drift into a society composed of tribal factions, as is happening in many Western countries. But without the space for the public use of reason, the state itself courts the danger of becoming just another instance of the private use of reason. At the beginning of the Covid outburst we saw the price a society had to pay for the absence of the public space of reason. Because the scientists who first discovered the virus were silenced, China lost precious months in which it could have limited the pandemic to a local incident. And now, apropos Shuai, we should raise a similar question: How come a political struggle (which should have been fought out in open) has to take the appearance of a sexual scandal? The challenge for us today—while a multiparty democracy is clearly less and less able to confront our big challenges like climate change—is: How to maintain the space for the public use of reason outside multiparty democracy in the Western liberal sense?