According to the right wing, the liberal and progressive movements in the US are afraid to tell it like it is. They communicate in a humorless, effeminate doublespeak, and seem more concerned with maintaining a touchy-feely etiquette than with engaging the bread and butter issues that drive real-life politics. At its worst, we are told, this preoccupation with avoiding offense becomes a fascistic policing of speech and thought, and an excuse to evade unpleasant or difficult realities. In the end, the dominance of political correctness on the Left demonstrates its unsuitability for political leadership. It betrays a utopian desire to live in a world where one can call things what one wants, rather than what they are, and a cautious sensitivity that has no place in the canon of classical political virtues. But most of all, and the right suspects that the more levelheaded of lefties know this, political correctness is just plain annoying.
It is beyond doubt that the right has already gained a good deal of ideological mileage out of this characterization. In fact, it is tempting to say that the phrase “political correctness” primarily refers to an ideological invention of the right, a brilliant trap designed to ensnare any progressive politics that bears upon language or symbols and associate it with a vast left-wing conspiracy to trample the First Amendment, sanitize intellectual and cultural life and, generally speaking, spoil everyone’s fun. But if “political correctness” is not the right way to talk about this “progressive politics of language,” then what is? It is true that, in recent years, progressives (and particularly progressive youth) have placed an increasing importance upon an individual’s or group’s power to define who they are by using their own words, and have drawn ever greater attention to “inappropriate” or “offensive” symbols or cultural products. Of course, such concerns have long been a part of social movements. But it is fair to say that recently these matters have been asserted as ends in themselves as they seldom have before, and have become affiliated with a general effort to place a reform of language and representation on the progressive agenda, and, even more, to live out this reform in practice. If we balk at the right’s attempt to ridicule this effort, then how do we ourselves evaluate it? How can we establish its relative justification? What are its limits or pitfalls? And, finally, is there really something annoying about it that cannot be chalked up to right-wing reaction, but which depends on more fundamental issues concerning the relationship of language to politics?
These are tough questions that demand serious discussion. Although the controversy over “political correctness” seems to have come and gone, it has announced new theoretical problems with which revolutionary thought has to contend. Many of these problems concern the political importance of language and the symbolic world, and the relation of this world to the formation of one’s identity, or sense of self. Marxism has admittedly been sparing in its treatment of such questions, and it would be irresponsible to dismiss them as “bourgeois” simply because they do not directly concern relations of production or even the super structural arenas of law and representational democracy. Language is important, in and of itself, especially when it speaks about who I am. To live in a world in which one is constantly called “nigger” or “faggot,” or in which one’s ethnic identity is constantly caricatured or misrepresented, is at the heart of the experience of oppression. We cannot treat it as an afterthought to supposedly more “material” concerns.
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