Express Yourself!
(via Ellis Sharp)
The student charged with “disorderly conduct” for handing in a creative writing piece including fantasies about shooting (and then, um, tampering with the bodies of) fellow students, clearly did not understand what was really at stake in his teacher’s exhortation to write whatever came into his head without “judging” or “censoring” it.
Specifically, he missed the implicit injunction: “at all costs, do not write anything that the Big Other would judge to be offensive, or wish to censor”. One does not write lurid fantasies about school shootings in America; or, at least, one does not show them to one’s teachers.
“Do not judge or censor” means, in this context, “accept only the Big Other’s standards of judgement and rules of acceptable expression, and do so tacitly and completely; do not attempt to appropriate for yourself the position of judge and censor, in order to interrogate that position or use it to produce new constraints and new values”.
April 28th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Except here is the problem: the Big Other does not exist. And thus it is difficult to know how one even could accept the Big Other’s standards of judgement: these standards are radically unknowable. So that, in the end, one is left in somewhat anxious position.
April 29th, 2007 at 1:59 am
Hi Dominic
I really like your way with worplay and suggest you start duelling with the bores on the Guardian Books Blog. I post there as OvidYeats and it’s the perfect place to bone and hone one’s gift mon amigo, as there are plenty of windy moaners who constitute the soft underbelly on which the greats can feast and lead to the new world poetic you seem to be espousing.
Good Luck