Let's talk about Vice Magazine

This is another of those intended slights which I rather like (I'm going to put it in my collection alongside '16 year old goth girl' and 'so far up his own arse that he's giving birth to himself' -- I'm trying to decide which of those to put on my tombstone).

Part of my appreciation for NY Vice is that I (heart) many of the people in the NY downtown scene who are making the magazine. I know that the UK edition is going to have a totally different tone, and I'm going to hate it. May I be the first to say 'UK Vice, we thought you were going to be subversive but you let us down. YOU ARE SO DEAD.'

'We had a show maybe twenty years ago and we showed a piece called 'Queer' and everybody was outraged at the word. They felt it was an aggressive attack on homosexual people. But three or four years later we were in a nightclub and we saw teenagers dancing the night away with 'Queer as fuck' written on their T shirts. And a year after that Queer Nation was founded, a very important movement. So in a way we robbed the evil word back from the enemy.'

"Nih ..... ger"
"Nih .. ger"
"Nigger?"
"Nigger!"

I think we got pissed off only after we wrote what came naturally to us and it offended people. We were determined to leave it in. It was just the way we talked. It’s surprising how brainwashed by hippies most of our generation is. Pro-love, pro-diversity, pro-tolerance–that’s the hippies’ bag. You want to hear people talk about niggers, try hanging around with black people. They are harsh. You want to hear anti-Semitism, go hang around with some Jews. You should hear Suroosh talk about fucking Pakis. It’s ear-burning. I’d argue that racists like the KKK don’t really have anything to say about niggers and fags because they don’t know any. They don’t go, "I am so sick of fucking drag queens. They are so self-indulgent. Fashion this, fashion that. Can’t you talk about politics for one second, you fucking transsexual?" They don’t know. We’re in the thick of it. When we’re pitching our television show, I say, "Understand that we are freaks. We’re not delving into the freak world. We live with the dregs of humanity.

I have no idea whether or not the Vice team *actually* live with the dregs of humanity (although somehow I doubt they hang out with pimps and crack addicts in their spare time), but this doesn't strike me as an attempt to recontextualise or reclaim language to me. It doesn't even strike me as genuine bigotry. It strikes me as a calculated attempt to shock liberals just for the sake of it. Very cutting edge... round of applause there Vice boys.

I don't understand this argument at all. Why exclude some of the people doing the recontextualising?

the point is, who cares who's first: what matters is that someone's last

Could you exand on this? Why is the person still using 'gay' to mean 'happy' (Robin Carmody, according to a recent essay of his) the important one?

As for the second bit, I'll expand on it (if necessary) once you've read it again, slowly and properly, actually noticing the words I'm using and thinking about their meaning carefully.

vice being first is meaningless if the repositioning doesn't happen
ie pioneers don't deserve props unless society realigns (fair enough, although I'd say that anyone trying to change things and stick their neck out deserves at least bravery props)

and of footnote-ish relevance if it does
ie Even if they're right, only historians care (well, that's a sadly anti-intellectual point, it seems mean to brush off even pioneers who really were prophetic)

(not that it IS first, obviously
So although you've made clear that Vice wouldn't qualify for praise if it were a false or a true prophet, you're also keen to suggest that it is neither. In which case, perhaps it's in the big knot of people who follow trends. But doesn't that make it like those kids in the disco wearing the 'Queer as fuck' T shirts? You seemed to think they were important?

but the point is, who cares who's first: what matters is that someone's last)
Well, this is gnomic. I can only assume you mean that nobody can come out of the closet until the last queer basher has vanished from the planet. Which is not a very brave position. But I'm sure I'm wrong. In which case, tell me what you did mean?

My feeling is if people who share common characteristics want to use certain terms to describe themselves, fine. Who am I to say otherwise?

Pardon? Why are you equating dress sense with sexuality? Aside from the fact that there are gay people involved in both.

In any case, you haven't responded to my point that using the word "nigger" or "paki" in an attempt to 'reclaim' it isn't actually any more constructive towards race relations than liberals not using the word at all, probably less so.

Short, mildly cryptic answer: their explanations -- in the form of their books -- were what were cutting-edge and subversive about them.

I love my mum and sister, but they can be a right pair of bigots sometimes (they move in pretty varied circles and like the Vice editors claim friendships with black people/gay people/etc so in no way are the Vicies subversive). The horrible thing is, they won't back down when I tell them they're talking utter racist shite; apparently if you're white and work 40 hours a week you receive special dispensation to disparage anyone on benefits, to moan about 'third-world' immigrants, to judge which black people are black people, and which are 'deserving' of some other epithet. It bugs the shit out of me that they cop these attitudes. What to do?

Oh no no no...I'm chiming in agreement with you, Suzy.

Since someone raised Freud, we could do worse than to think about this question in the light of his theory of 'the narcissism of small differences'. This says that the people who really hate each other are the ones who are identical in all but a few small details. Sibling rivalry, for instance, or the feud between Jews and Arabs (both semitic), or that between socialists and communists.

The only person I know who uses the word Paki is my Bangladeshi ex-wife. She has a brother called Shaki, and the family calls him 'Shaki the Paki'. It's an affectionate insult (Bangladeshis and Pakistanis don't get on, for historical reasons).

At the same time as Bangladeshis are dissing people as 'Pakis' for 'hot' reasons (and I mean by 'hot' that there's passion and history in the slight), you get the government running poster campaigns saying 'To call someone a Paki is racism. Don't do it!' In contrast to the hot yet historical illiberalism of the street, you get cold, institutionalised (what Vice would call 'hippy') utopian liberalism trying to stamp out 'the narcissism of small differences' in the name of the sort of value-blindness that causes institutions to put a blindfold on their statues of Justice and say 'All citizens are equal'. It's the high-minded 'Should World' of the Courts versus the lowdown 'Is World' of the streets.

What Vice is clearly saying is 'We live in the world of Is, not Should. We keep it real. We use the 'hot' definitions of the streets and not those of 'cold' liberalism.' But they use a different kind of liberalism to justify this; they say 'We are living amongst the people we are 'slighting' with these epithets, and we're using them because that's the language they use. It would be presumptuous and pompous of us to use cold liberal terms in that context. We aren't the KKK, but we also aren't hippies. What unites the KKK and hippies -- the cold left and the cold right -- is their abstraction of minorities into devils or angels. We're showing the reality, warts and all.'

And it's at that point that you have a personal reaction to what the Vice editors are saying. Are you the kind of person who thinks that the more humans know about each other -- the gritty details, the hot emotions -- the more they'll accept humanity, or are you the kind of person who thinks that we can tolerate each other only thanks to massive doses of wishful thinking, abstraction and distance? And might it be that your 'cold liberalism' is not just a kind of passive Utopianism but a way of burying your head in the sand -- because you can? 'I won't confront these issues until they get less emotive,' you say. 'In the meantime I'll just try not to offend or hurt anyone'.

You may think that -- essentially the white flight attitude, refuge in the 'burbs -- is the solution to race relations problems. Or you may think that getting close enough to the battle front to feel the heat of 'the narcissism of small differences' would be a better start. Because, at the very least, if you join the battle things are going to get more complex and confusing. You're going to dilute some of the clear demarcations, lift some of the earnestness and, frankly, introduce quite a lot of surrealism and irony into a tense stand-off. Maybe somebody will laugh, and suddenly the whole situation will change. I'm sure there was laughter -- first nervous, then relieved -- when the first 'Queer as fuck' T shirt hit the streets.

I think we got pissed off only after we wrote what came naturally to us and it offended people. We were determined to leave it in. It was just the way we talked. It’s surprising how brainwashed by
hippies most of our generation is.

is claim their own language/stance as natural and authentic and everyone else's as reprogrammed, which hardly recognises the kind of complex intervention in competing semantics that Momus is claiming for them. I think to grant them this is as foolish as assuming there is one hot language, one real, of the streets (one real hot street ha ha). I'm not disputing the real of anyone's experience, but we're talking about mediation and representation here, where there's surely no single or essential real. or Given that the Vice people lay claim to an unreflexive rootedness in 'what's really going on', who is allowed to confront Vice and say 'that's not my real' (as opposed to 'that's not (morally) right')? (I just read Dan's point above, which may answer that question).

BTW Momus: props for a consistent and inventive defence of your position and almost incredible good humour in the face of sometimes nasty disagreement on this thread. i have thought this through hard and admitted a lot more ambiguity into my basic disagreement as a result of his points (along with lots of other ppl's, obv).

No white person has carte blanche to call me "nigger".

I think Dan nails it here. There's an assumption being made that I don't think exists about the viability of said carte blanche.

(PS: Damn, I hope you didn't have e-mail notifications turned on.)