“Nigger.” --Not The Joker
“There is, in all those late eras that allow themselves to be proud of human-ness itself, so much fear, so much fearful superstition regarding the ‘wild savage animals’ of earlier times--above which that so human era is so proud to have become master--that even the most obvious, most easily graspable truths go unexpressed for hundreds of years, as though by unanimous agreement, because these truths seem as though they might resurrect those much-feared, finally killed-off ‘wild savage animals.’” --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #229
“Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.” --Hermione Granger
***
In 2018, a study found that liberals--particularly white liberals--significantly simplify and friendlify their speech when talking to black people. Much of the discourse surrounding the study has labeled this “patronizing” behavior as racist, but what if the opposite is true? What if such apparently “patronizing” speech is actually just friendliness, an attempt to assert a shared in-group membership, expressed within a society that holds complexity of speech to be directly proportional to pretentiousness?
***
If we think of humans ecologically, we come to a complication that, so far as I know, is unprecedented: The herd’s most fearsome threat is not an easily-recognizable predator species but, rather, other members of the same species. The human ecological network as a body which produces its own fatal disease: Paranoia arises as the inevitable autoimmune disorder of a body under constant threat of civil war, or in which civil war may always have already begun.
Social space must therefore be permeated with tripwires: Taboo functions, in this analogy, as an antibody, as an inborn vaccine which, like any vaccine, is only useful if ubiquitous. The regime of signs in which the taboo is defined must therefore also be ubiquitously upheld.
Denial of a generally accepted taboo becomes undoubtable alliance with a fatal disease.
***
Each taboo is therefore coupled to a particular feared pathogen. The taboo against the word, “nigger,” is of course coupled to the fear of racism. The word is, indeed, violent: It provokes an autoimmune response: It is violent both against the individual hearer, as it forces this hearer to react against it like a good leukocyte, else the hearer also be deemed pathological, such that the word itself reassembles the conditions of slavery which are held to be its origin; and against the herd, for it asserts that the herd is discontinuous, that it failed to recognize a pathogen before it became violent, so that, each time the word is used, the herd’s paranoia must intensify--it registers signs which often appear with the word as new taboos, the social space fills with ever more and ever more esoteric tripwires...until either speech takes on a constant, irrevocable quality of fear; or we assert the inevitable progress to absurdity of verbal taboos.
***
The absurdity of verbal taboo among a species which is its own biggest threat: The taboo is just as easily understood by the pathogens as by the antibodies. To assume that a taboo will retain its herd-defensive function over time is as silly as expecting antibiotics to work in fifty years. Even now, one may not reasonably expect a dangerous racist to say “nigger” within earshot of antibodies: They keep it to 4chan or to face-to-face talks with other racists.
The function of the taboo has become illusory: It identifies only the idiot racists or else the non-racists who simply do not ascribe to the regime of signs in which the word is taboo, for there are such non-racists, such perpetual others, outsiders who are not necessarily pathogenic but who are nevertheless other, against all axioms of the herd’s constitution, and are therefore always held, in the knee-jerk reaction of the herd, to be pathogenic.
***
So we come to the old tired subject of intent, a subject fundamentally dangerous to any herd animal as herd animal, for to accept the value of intent is to undermine the script in which the herd operates--that is, to challenge the very identity of the herd animal as such by challenging the necessity of the herd as a communication-enabling medium. Like asserting a non-contiguous body, a body constituted mainly by difference rather than unity, a body in which the cells themselves are primary.
When the intent behind a taboo utterance becomes the focus of the taboo, there can no longer be any taboo, and threats must be recognized as threats rather than as the signs which surround them: Rather than looking at the edge, one must actually stand there and look down into the pit. A more accurate view of danger, clearly, but one reserved only for those who believe in their own ability to face danger. That is, reserved only for the strong, if, after all, such a descriptor is still admissible…
***
What of the Joker’s particular usage of “nigger”? It is simultaneously the weakest, most herd-affirming, and the most pathological type. Weak because the Joker posts so much about the permissions given by black folks for his usage of the word; pathological for the very same reason. Does not the idea that any black person can give one permission to say “nigger” reinforce the exact dehumanization that the word supposedly represents? Does it not clearly assert that one black person can speak for all others--that is, that the will of each individual black person is subjugated to a common racial will? Is it not clearly, unquestionably racist as fuck? Exactly as it attempts to assert its non-racism, to endear itself to the herd?
Perhaps the herd’s most dedicated members--those most “oversocialized”--are exactly as dangerous to it--to themselves--as those they consider pathological. They are, after all, the components of an autoimmune disorder.
***
But then, the Joker has done something admirable: He has, at the very least, divided the herd with its own logic of cohesion. Comment threads for the countdown (I’ll link it again) consist almost entirely of two comment types: The first, “Do it.” The second, “Don’t do it.”
But then, a third type: “Will he do it?” This is most interesting: If the Joker had only divided the herd, he would have given it no way out of the circular logic that has built “nigger” into the N-word--i.e. it’s taboo because it’s violent, and it’s violent precisely because it’s taboo. But this third type of comments points to confusions of the script itself, more specifically of its normal separation of all humans into two characters: The herd members and the pathological (the violent, the dangerous, the cancelled, etc.). There is no consensus as to whether, if he says it, he will be exiled (and this, I must say, is the genius in his getting permission beforehand, even if such permission is fundamentally more racist than the word itself).
Most importantly, there is no consensus as to whether even an actual murderer will say the word. There is no way to compare, in the paranoia of the herd, one breakage of taboo to another: Each implies the same difference.
There are only judgements of the scale of punishment deserved. But then, elementary schools will still play music by the Beach Boys, though some of their songs were written by Charles Manson, while many schools will not allow the reading of even an excerpt from Huck Finn…likewise, leftists much more often pillory Trump for his racist words than for the fact that he almost certainly has sex with kids.
***
Should not all the oversocialized anxiously await the day when “nigger” may be said openly, with a hard -r, for that day will mark the time when the racism associated with the word has ceased to be a threat?
What, though, if that time has already come? As I said, the only racists who would openly use the word must be the non-threats, the idiots, or else those so far away from the herd in which the word is taboo that they cannot touch it.
***
Imagine that a white man has self-identified as a “nigger”: Is he still a pathology to the herd? Or has he simply opted out of the regime in which the taboo against that word is set? He has certainly used it in a way that directly contradicts its taboo form.
***
To hold that the hard -r is more racist than the form “nigga” is itself a form of race-realism, in which the hard -r is supposed to be the inherently white pronunciation and is therefore more racist. Again we find that the forms of logic necessary to uphold the taboo as it currently exists imply exactly the type of racism for which the word “nigger” was exiled from polite vocabulary.
***
One may counter, “But the N-word inextricably carries with it a legacy of slavery!”
So does the word “iPhone,” but there is no similar taboo against Apple.
“But the N-word inextricably carries with it a legacy of slavery!” means, when said by an unapologetic smartphone owner or clothes wearer, “The forms of slavery which have been institutionally denounced are terrible, but the other types are fine.”
That “life is suffering” is cliché. The equally true statement that life is making others suffer is much more poignant.
***
If usage of the word “nigger” will be immediately punished by those who live primarily as herd members, it is to the advantage of all strong wills who would like to be surrounded by other strong wills to say the word whenever they enter a new social group, then to befriend whomever is not appalled.
If one gets permission from a black person first, though, one has simply shown oneself to be another of the herd-racists, for the herd is, as a rule, thoroughly racist, as demonstrated earlier.
To restate: The black race as seen by the herd: A headless body onto which any sufficiently dark/sufficiently gened person may place their head and thereby speak for the whole. This monstrous figure, which underlies the notion of the “N-word pass,” is dehumanizing, silencing, minimizing, oppressive, and oh-so-very racist.
***
So, then, in the end, what of the Joker? A decent thought experiment, but one which does nothing to break the fundamentally racist forms in which the taboo against the N-word is rooted.
***
And what, in the end, of the Eunuch? Oh, they aspire to be like the word “nigger”: That everyone who associates with them will immediately appear to have broken from the herd; that their presence will render questionable the very sphere of the possible (“Will he say it?”); that they will experience the world as it is, with that oft-misunderstood “scientific” mind of which Nietzsche talks so much, that is, that they will experience the world with immediacy and intensity and, as far as possible, directly, and not as a series of slavish reactions to masks and imprecise hints; that they will stare, that is, not at the edge of the pit, and tremble, but that they will lean over it, stare straight down into it, perhaps even spelunk, map its bowels...for who knows where the word “nigger” has been, into what caves it is forced, to what heights such an unquestionably powerful expression may climb when untethered to a racism that does not necessarily accompany it, but which certainly accompanies its taboo; that they will be hidden and transported in myriad minds like a magnet, either to attract or to repel but always with intense strength; that they should be immediately rejected by all herd animals of their species, oh, that social life should be so easy to navigate!; yes, finally, that they should be considered the most pathological of their kind by those who consider any difference and any unpredictability pathological!
***
For the curious: I’m white.
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