Strong Lines

In a Guardian column the other day, Zoe Williams wrote about the “war between snowflakes and boomers”, mainly criticizing what older people see as an exaggeration or lack of perspective or proportion in young people’s language:

Gen Z and their language: nothing can ever be mean, it always has to be abusive. Nothing can ever be painful, it always has to be traumatic. Nothing can ever stir up a bad memory, it always has to be triggering. Don’t get me wrong, I will always naturally side with the young, because now there are only two sides: snowflakes and boomers. The rest of us just have to pick a team. But I can’t be expected to not laugh. Abusive relationship with your best friend? The very idea.

I have sometimes felt this way myself. It’s tempting to see this kind of emotional inflation not just as ridiculous but as erasing the very real difference between, say, Taylor Swift’s crisis and the crisis of a homeless addict in Vancouver’s downtown East side, or between the trauma of a breakup and the trauma of refugees watching their families die as they try to get to Europe. On the other hand, who is to decide whether someone else’s experience constitutes trauma or crisis? This is not a trivial argument: it connects with old debates in political theory around the “state of exception”: who decides what is normal and what is exceptional? That is a deeply, fundamentally political question. We have to be very careful about imposing “normalcy” on individuals while also bearing in mind the difference between the experience of suburban white teenagers and inner-city Black or Indigenous ones. How do we ensure that people have the language and tools to describe and communicate their own inner experiences while not reducing everything to a relativistic mess in which no real communication is possible at all. (These are the questions that plague post-positivist philosophy: what does it mean to feel something? do we ever feel things or do we only ever talk about them? is what I name a feeling the same feeling as what you call by the same name?)

But leaving that aside, I also see in this kind of inflationary language a justified reaction to a move in the opposite direction. George Carlin had a routine where he skewered the kind of corporate “beigification” of language. His example was the transformation over time from “shell shock” to “battle fatigue” to “operational exhaustion” to “post-traumatic stress disorder”. Carlin saw this as a march of euphemisms in which the “pain is [gradually] buried beneath the jargon”, concluding that “if we’d have still been calling it shellshock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time”.

Carlin is right about the euphemism aspect, of course, the way less emotive language serves to excise or obscure the ugly emotional reality. The counter argument is that these terms are more “scientifically accurate”, that they better represent the physical process in question, or that the connection between language and reality match up more closely. Pragmatist philosophers deny that any such accuracy exists and that it’s a fool’s errand to pursue it, but leaving that aside, the accuracy claim is the probably major rationale behind this kind of emotional deflation.

But euphemism is not the only process in play here. There is also a hegemonic role: if the world can be portrayed in language as unemotional, orderly, well-understood, then it is administratable. If shell shock is a normal phenomenon, then so are wars. If nothing is unexpected - because we have a scientific name for it - then everything is foreseeable. Nothing less than the hegemony of the military-industrial-prison complex is at stake here. This is the kind of thing Foucault wrote about in the great descriptions of the organizational structures and cultures of prisons and hospitals. The discourse of normality helps to impose normality; the discourse of scientific accuracy helps impose a culture of scientism; the discourse of orderly unfolding helps impose a structure of smoothly unfolding administration.

Looked at in this way, the inflated language of Gen Z is an absolutely justified reaction, an attempt to restore some of exceptionality to these experiences. Things are abusive and not just mean because we want to eradicate abuse. Things are traumatic rather than painful because we want to stamp out trauma. Meanness and pain are normal, but it is easy to understand why we might want to portray them as exceptional because we want them to stop. The only thing Gen Z is guilty of here is of using too broad a brush stroke. In any event, “you love to see it”, because it indicates that the kind of corporatized, neoliberal, military-scientific hegemony is imperfect, that people are rejecting it in favour of something more emotionally congruent and certainly more stirring. It’s like moving from the Beatles to Black Sabbath, it’s the search for stronger meat.

And this kind of shift is itself normal. We can see it in the move from the courtly lines of the sixteenth century to the “strong lines” of Milton and the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth. Shakespeare stands as the transitional figure here, someone who was at home in the courtly language of the 1590s as well as the stronger language of the early 1600s. Milton and others, like Hobbes, were inspired by the violence of the civil war, but already in Shakespeare I think we can see the seeds of the eventual failure of Tudor-Stuart hegemony.

Here’s to my love! O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.