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PETER BROOKS
We don't have any of the metaphors, and because we don't,
"revolution" is literally
inconceivable
in this country. There are
countercultural life-style metaphors -levitating the Pentagon, put–
ting the New Haven courthouse on the moon (Abbie Hoffman) -
but they don't yet have any revolutionary consistency. The only lan–
guage that has that consistency is from the Black culture: it carries
true menace when it breaks through into consciousness.
((Right On"
and
((Power to the People"
are the most intense and sharp revolution–
ary language this country has produced in recent history. Yet you
can't use them. You feel like a fool shouting
((Power to the Pwple,"
or
at least you should. The students tried it, but those with any aware–
ness found it couldn't be done. It belongs to the Panthers, not to us.
Try talking about "pigs." The Yale students discovered this at a
remarkable moment
in
a mass meeting, when Panther David Hil–
liard was haranguing them and said it was all right to shoot pigs
because pigs weren't real people. The students booed him. This was
a stupid reaction, because they should have regarded Hilliard's state–
ment not as a stump speech but as a display of psychic wounds, yet
it showed a coming to awareness about the threat of that language
when
it
burst forth from the enclave into a larger political context.
I'm not arguing, as Robert Brustein did when during the strike
we held a forum on "Language and Revolution," that
((Off the Pigs"
and
((Power to the People"
are euphemisms like "The Final Solution"
which dehumanize and pervert people through perversion of lan–
guage. I think he was confusing euphemism and metaphor. The
Panther phrases are the metaphor of argot, a secret language de–
signed to identify members of a group and intensify their commu–
nication through exclusion of anyone outside their circle. Whereas
euphemism is a kind of public metonymy, a way of avoiding nam–
ing the reality you are talking about, an avoidance which is accepted
by all to sidestep confrontation with what things really are. The
"Language and Revolution" forum brought this out, in confused
and halting form, mostly in the audience's reactions to Brustein.
They felt that the language of a subculture had burst into their con–
sciousness, and that this fact of itself had revolutionary import. Much
of what was going on at Yale had to do with this bursting into
consciousness and the effort to define one's relationship to that lan–
guage. The language, and your problem of what to do with it, posed
the question: whose revolution? Both ours and not ours, with us and
against us, exhilarating and threatening.
