If you are older than I am, you will think it is trivial when I say there was a time when we didn’t constantly call things “problematic.” If you are younger, you will think it’s unthinkable. I loathe this word. Its wretched, bastard children, “problematize” and (shudder) “problematization,” are maybe even more popular today, because words that come into common usage for reasons of pure ideological fashion inevitably mutate and then pass out of it for the same reasons. The real, presumptuous purpose of a word such as “problematic” is more like a threat than an argument. It is not employed to try to convince you that there is some particular problem you should be concerned with, but to remind you that there is a consensus against saying something.
“Problematic” wasn’t the harbinger of these words that are used to end arguments without further discussion. Before that, we talked about whether it was “OK” to say things and called things we wanted to suppress “not OK.” “Is It O.K. to Joke About Occupy Now?” asked the headline of a 2012 New York Times piece that answered it was not. (How about now, I wonder?) And before that, there was, of course, “offensive.”
The question raised in each case is “So what if it is?” Why shouldn’t we talk around problems, and offense, and the not-OK parts of life? Are we all one another’s therapists? We are not, but two very depressing examples from the past week have convinced me that picture of ourselves remains the default for too many people. First: WNYC, the public radio station for what is supposed to be the most bohemian and sophisticated city in the world, is running the following warning over archived recordings of old radio programs: “This episode is from the WNYC archives. It may contain language which is no longer politically or socially appropriate.”
Second: The darkly comic lyricist and cult favorite rocker Nick Cave responded to a listener comment on his newsletter from a fan, who asks: “Do you ever feel the need to change lyrics, when performing live, which may be problematic in 2020, for example, ‘A fag in a whalebone corset dragging his d— across my cheek?’” Cave’s reply says it better than I can hope to, and it’s worth quoting at length:
“What songwriter could have predicted thirty years ago that the future would lose its sense of humour, its sense of playfulness, its sense of context, nuance and irony, and fall into the hands of a perpetually pissed off coterie of pearl-clutchers? How were we to know?
Perhaps we writers should have been more careful with our words — I can own this, and I may even agree — however, we should never blame the songs themselves. Songs are divinely constituted organisms. They have their own integrity. As flawed as they may be, the souls of the songs must be protected at all costs. They must be allowed to exist in all their aberrant horror, unmolested by these strident advocates of the innocuous, even if just as some indication that the world has moved toward a better, fairer and more sensitive place. If punishment must be administered, punish the creators, not the songs. We can handle it. I would rather be remembered for writing something that was discomforting or offensive, than to be forgotten for writing something bloodless and bland.”
Indeed.
