Fluidity

Although the Liberty Paint Factory and factory hospital episodes may seem bizarre, they make sense from a historical perspective.

The Invisible Man, the study guide.

This was a comment in one of the reclamation threads, but I can’t find it anywhere and forgot to note down its origin:

Reclaiming language doesn’t actually make the assberets go anywhere. And they’ll find a way to make their bigotry known if they want to. So, in that sense, you’re right: it’s hard to see the real point of reclamation. But I’m not sure that is the point. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a careful argument on this, and I certainly haven’t read one recently. There is something odd going on with this, but whether that oddness is because there’s something about the motivation for reclamation that’s obscure, or because the whole idea is based on discredited or messed up linguistic ideas or something, I really don’t know.

…

In the sense I was talking about, it’s not really “reclamation” per se, it’s more a tactical response, not really intended to operate beyond the immediate situation. I’m just noting that the issue may not break tidily into pro and con.

In that thread, I was writing about a basic component of reclamation that simply wasn’t there; I wasn’t trying to challenge or nod along with various theories about when and how reclamation might succeed. I understand that I might have given a lazy impression because of that focus, so let me clarify here.

I don’t think that it’s useful or sensible to see reclamation as a straightforward task. Reclaiming a word isn’t like recapturing a city. To the extent that a word may be used in defiant reference to its original meaning, that original meaning is available to its users. The endpoint, what I guess you’d call victory, would be the removal of meaning. Reclamation is a more contextual, temporary thing–an individual act in the face of an overwhelmingly hateful consensus. It takes place during performative interludes or in subcultural conversations. Although I do not think it would be fair to say that reclamation perpetuates negative meaning in the larger culture, it usually requires its presence.

I think that the conflict over reclamation might be stuck on notions of totality–of this idea that you have to take over entirely in order to take back at all–when reclamation is a minority strategy, something that happens in the context of marginalization. In order for laughter to be revolutionary, you need to be laughing at something that’s not only absurd but lethal. Presumably, there’ll be some point at which we don’t need to reclaim words because they’re not being used against us in the first place. I don’t see any reason to limit the use of language to that environment, since no one really knows what it would look like or how we’d go about describing ourselves in it. As currently configured, slurs even invite linguistic vandalism, particularly for creative people. What’s more fascinating to a poet than language used to destroy? A word that threatens to remove your voice?

But this means that reclamation has a limited effect, or at least one that occurs on a different level. It doesn’t remove the original meaning of the word in some magical way. It certainly doesn’t make it impossible for bigots to use the word in the way they prefer. All it does is establish space for another potential meaning in what should be the most inimical place. I think that’s a valuable and interesting way to use language, and that it can have some spectacular effects. It’s a difficult artistic task to set oneself, given the need to run close to the dominant meaning. And the pessimism makes sense; the people who just can’t get past the original meaning of those horrible words are often people who’ve been damaged by them. Between the FDL comment that annoyed me off so much, and the constant, “But they can say it!” whining, the concept of reclamation itself has clearly been ganked back.

Kevin at Slant Truth posted a link to an essay by Mark Anthony Neal about reclamation, one that outlines some of the conflicting ideas about flexibility of meaning:

In many sectors “blackness” is literally thought to be under siege. It is in this context that many of the contemporary tropes of “blackness” that circulate in commercial popular culture, particularly in popular music, film and music video, are deemed threats to blackness – as tropes of an erosive and inauthentic blackness that is as threatening to the Black Public proper as “death” itself. This sense of threat, has been, perhaps, most powerfully expressed in these debates over the use of the word “nigger” in popular culture which highlight a philosophical divide within “blackness.”

It is in the context of this divide that I posit my own “nigger” theory. Whereas the term “nigger” references notions of “blackness” as landlocked, immobile, static, segregated, and an embodiment of black racial subjects in the pre-20th century South, I would like to argue that the term “nigga” (and its attendant variations) relates to concepts of blackness as mobile, fluid, adaptable, post-modern, urban, and embodying various forms of social and rhetorical flow that are fully realized within the narratives of hip-hop.

I think that Neal is talking about another level of reclamation. In other words, this is not the act undertaken to destabilize the static system of racism, but an attempt to make oneself into an agent of continuous destabilization. Not the decision to make poetry but the insistence that one is a poet, a reclaimed person, a resister. But this is as contested a strategy as reclaiming a word:

What hip-hop culture has essentially done is make explicit the very crisis of identity that the black public at large faces. According to literary scholar Sharon Patricia Holland, “identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.” (See Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 137).

There is also a perception that those of the hip-hop generation employ the word out of a sense of historical ignorance and in the simple pursuit of the financial opportunities encompassed in being the “realest” nigger within the music industry. Such perceptions hold the hip-hop generation and its artists accountable for making explicitly public, aspects of black life that largely remained within the confines of segregated black spaces, just a generation or two ago. As legal scholar Imani Perry observes, “there is no private space to distinguish between the nigga in the black linguistic world and the nigga in the white.” (See Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004], 143).

Destabilization itself, then, the willingness to court ambiguity, is read as a very dangerous way of working against dominant meaning. Again, I think that the people who despair of language have a point, and not just when they stick to original intent. To be hated–to be the walking personification of the Negative–is to live inside and against a constructed shell of meaning. Invisibility. To opt into fluidity, mobility, adaptability can seem uncomfortably close to that earlier existence behind a scrim. What are you supposed to be?

I’ve always sided with the revolutionary monsters on a personal level, but that might be more of an artistic affinity than a political one. I know how sensitive I am. I know that fluidity is fucking exhausting. And like the woman says, reclamation often involves the same kind of work-so-hard-it-looks-easy level of commitment that produces the best art:

IN ALL OF MY CELEBRATION AND EXAMINATION of language and my relationship to it, I give in to the seductive flow and paint myself as a wizard. That is, of course, the words running away from me. They have a way of doing that. Perhaps for a time, and at times, I am allowed to play the Wizard. But inevitably, there will be a moment where it would be more accurate to compare my use of language to that of Mickey Mouse setting an army of brooms into motion and….

Language is indeed a power, but even if you understand that and have a piece of it, it surely doesn’t mean you will wield that power well, or wisely. And though you may be able to find a hidden scroll, that doesn’t guarantee you will know how to use the spells therein—and even if you did, if you would find the one you most need.