The Unacceptable

J. Potts, J. Scannell, J. Potts, J. Scannell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349436859, 9781137014566
• eBook ISBN: 9781137014573
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

Confronting the issue of the unacceptable as a social category, this collection of international essays provides distinctive perspectives on the theme of what is deemed socially acceptable. The book reveals the ways category of the unacceptable reflects sexual, racial and political fault-lines of a society.

Part I

The Socially Unacceptable

1

Power and the Unacceptable

Mitchell Dean

The unacceptable is a grey zone. We are used to identifying the unacceptable with what is proscribed, forbidden, censored and banned. Yet this implies a juridical model of power as command and repression and a ‘police’ complex to secure and enforce the ban. What is unacceptable often finds itself under the ban, such as a film rejected by a censorship board. On many occasions, however, the unacceptable falls short of what essentially is a juridical-theological model.

Often, the utterance ‘this is unacceptable’, is a performative one that may belie the incapacity of the actor making the statement to issue and secure a prohibition. It enacts a condition of censure, of disapproval and perhaps annoyance. An example would be when a politician says, ‘Unemployed people have no right to reject available jobs’. It also performs, more or less successfully, the authority of the speaker to decide on questions of acceptability. Of course, the same politician in government might seek to compel the unemployed person to accept a menial or low-paid job by removing their right to benefits if they decline it. However, in a condition of wage-labour, which formally depends on the voluntary agreement of an employee to work for their employer, it is difficult for governments to force anyone to accept a particular job.

The other side of the law – either religious or secular – that forbids are the acts of transgression. There is, thus, little choice but to obey or to sin. However, the unacceptable is located in the grey zone between the two and circulates between regimes of power and economies of desire and pleasure. Thus, it is hard to imagine a notion of the unacceptable that does not imply a contestation of what is or is not acceptable, with the forces at stake not simply rational social and economic struggles, but those of pleasure and desire. The unacceptable is not the breaking of a taboo but the eliciting of power, desire and pleasure that circulates around that taboo.

My thesis here is that speech about and representation of aspects of power, particularly those concerned with domination and submission, and violence and coercion, has entered the grey zone of the unacceptable. I first provide some recent examples of this concerning speech about fascism and then use Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘saying the true’ or ‘veridiction’ to address the conditions of acceptability or not of speaking about and representing fascism and speaking about and representing power. I argue that there are two alternatives to a juridical-theological proscription of certain kinds of speech that seek to remain acceptable: first, an ethico-political one, which examines desire and pleasure around power as an element of working on and governing individual and collective conduct; and, second, a visual-aesthetic one, which allows unexamined images of masochistic pleasure to circulate as a form of consumption and capital. I further suggest that eroticism acts as a ‘signature’ that moves power from the ethico-political domain, in which speech maintains a central position, to that of the relatively silent language of the visual-aesthetic domain.

Unacceptable speech

In a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011, the Danish director, Lars von Trier, enunciated a view that, despite later apologies and reframing as a joke, would prove unacceptable to the festival’s board. In response to a question concerning his German roots, and his interest in Nazi aesthetics, he rambled:

I really wanted to be a Jew . . . and then I found out that I was really a Nazi, you know because my family was German, Hartmann, which also gave me some pleasure . . .

What can I say? I understand Hitler. But I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end . . . [turning to actor, Kirsten Dunst, seated at his left] There will come a point at the end of this . . .

No, I’m just saying I think I understand the man. He is not what you would call a good guy but I understand the man. I sympathise with him a little bit, yes.¹

There was more to come as he sought to extricate himself from his own strange verbal cul-de-sac. It included a straightforward endorsement of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, and ironic comments about his Jewish colleague, director Susanne Bier. He called Israel a ‘pain in the ass’, and at the end muttered a joke, if that could ever be the right word, about ‘the Final Solution with journalists’. It is hard to provide the cadence of von Trier’s English with its characteristic Danish inflection and accent, his hesitations and self-mocking laughter. However, these comments came after others that also played within the grey zone of unacceptability. He had said that his film in the main competition, Melancholia, ‘maybe was crap’ and not worth seeing. He had joked that Dunst demanded a ‘beaver shot’ in the film, a slang expression for an unintended picture of a vagina, and that women wanted more ‘once they get started’. He talked about wishing to make a hard-core film of ‘unpleasant sex’. All of these earlier comments, including the misogyny, were received as jokes and had provoked laughter by the assembled journalists. By the end of the Nazi rave, however, the laughter had dissipated. At the conclusion, Dunst can be heard whispering to him: ‘Lars, that was intense.’

There was undoubtedly an element of humour through self-exposure and public self-analysis in von Trier’s discussion. In a display that is embarrassing to watch and even appalling, we see him drowning under the waves of a simultaneous recognition, rejection and justification of its own desire. Within a day, he had been banned from the festival and declared ‘persona non grata’ by its board of directors, with effect immediately. They said:

We profoundly regret that this forum has been used by Lars von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of this festival.²

In doing so, the festival drew a line between its own humanism and von Trier’s comments and, by proxy, between humanism and fascism.

The possibilities of interpretation of this minor event are almost endless, as contemporary blogs revealed. Irrespective of the motives, genre and degree of coherence or conviction of his comments, the Danish director had stumbled in his excursus on the terrain of the unacceptable. Or, rather, the unacceptable had found a way to leave its subject in disarray. He would pay a certain price for it, including missed opportunities for awards at Cannes and elsewhere (his film, Melancholia, received no Academy Award nominations, despite receiving much critical praise and a number of critics’ prizes), although he surely generated enormous additional publicity for his film in the process. The comments are, without doubt, unacceptable, not least their trivialisation of the Holocaust as a topic for humour and making light of anti-Semitism. Whether they placed von Trier outside the ideals of humanity and generosity, which paradoxically would no longer be extended to him by the Cannes committee, is another question.

One hypothesis worth considering, however, is that what is unacceptable here is not so much the express contents of his remarks but his performative relation to them. After all, the 2004 film Downfall and historians such as Ian Kershaw had previously sought to understand Hitler as a monstrously flawed but, nonetheless, human figure.³ Moreover, no member of the assembled audience would regard von Trier as actually a Nazi or anti-Semite. What perhaps was most unacceptable about the Lars von Trier press conference was an eminent artist performing a revaluation of his personal relationship, including that of pleasure, to fascism and fascist aesthetics and linking that to a former, and to some extent ongoing, Jewish identification. In so doing, he had reopened, perhaps unintentionally and by way of these aesthetics, a political problematic of the 1970s. This had approached fascism as less a historically bounded event and more a continuing part of European, if not Western, culture and identity. This was a problematic of the fascist elements of desire, and the desire for power, which had been addressed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book, Anti-Oedipus. Foucault, invoking Saint Frances de Sales, had famously prefaced their book as a possible ‘Introduction to a Non-fascist Life’.⁴ If one of the first elements of such a life was the willingness to make an ethical examination of the fascism within one’s self and one’s cultural identifications, rather than viewing it as a historically delimited phenomenon, then it would appear that von Trier had at least begun, if not resolved, his own self-examination. One response to von Trier’s comments would be that they belong in a psychoanalytical rather than public context.

For Deleuze and Guattari, his statement, ‘I wanted to be a Jew . . . but now I am a Nazi’, illustrated a kind of delirium or oscillation in which desire can be invested alternatively as revolutionary or fascist, as ‘schizoid’ or ‘paranoiac’. They wrote, in an extraordinary anticipation of von Trier’s comments⁵:

We contrasted [ . . . ] two major types of equally social investments: the one sedentary and biunivocalizing, and of a reactionary or fascist tendency; the other nomadic and polyvocal, and of a revolutionary tendency. In fact, in the schizoid declaration – ‘I am of a race inferior for all eternity’, ‘I am a beast, a black’, ‘We are all German Jews’ – the historico-social field is no less invested than in the paranoiac formula: ‘I am one of your kind, from the same place as you, I am a pure Aryan, of a superior race for all time.’

Deleuze and Guattari have clearly identified not a psychopathology here but the complexity of the ‘molecular’ investments of desire in particular social fields. In the sense that von Trier’s statements included both these investments, which they would characterise as schizoid, as nomadic and above all polyvocal – there is more than one voice here. The press conference was not the first time von Trier expressed the oscillations of his aesthetic-political investments. In a 2005 interview,⁶ the questioner asks him about his mother’s death-bed revelation that his biological father was not the Jewish father who had raised him but a man who was a descendant of the Danish composer, J.P.E. Hartmann, and that this had been a way of securing a creative genetic makeup for her child. Here, he used the same formulation: ‘Until that point I thought I had a Jewish background. But I’m really more of a Nazi.’ Of his mother, he says, ‘If I’d known my mother has this plan. I would have become something else. I would have shown her. The slut!’

According to this evidence, there appears a closer relationship between the misogyny and the Jew/Nazi oscillation than might have been first apparent. Von Trier had described his parents in the same interview as ‘communist nudists’ but had now found out that his mother practised a kind of positive eugenics to beget a creative child. In one event, then, he had been deprived of his Jewish identification and become not only of German heritage but the result of the kind of genetic model that had founded Nazi racial policies.

It is clear that what happened at Cannes was more than a publicity stunt and certainly neither an expression of political commitment nor a form of hate speech. In the 2005 interview, he discussed his view of the inseparability of the political and the sexual and his use of ‘Nazis, slaves and slave owners’:

These are extreme images which I use to examine the categories that have left their mark on me. My family had a very clear idea of good and evil, of kitsch and good art. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: What Is the Unacceptable?
• Part I: The Socially Unacceptable
• Part II: Representing the Unacceptable
• Index