STEVEN MARCUS
633
cultural objects along with the relative autonomy of the so-called super–
structure, its loose and incompletely determined nature as well. And it
was with the purpose of modulating reductive simplicities and addressing
more adequately the complexities of cultural and mental life that such
projects as the sociology of knowledge and Gramsci's reflections on
hegemony were undertaken. The spirit of these essays in ideological anal–
ysis was anti-reductive and anti-totalitarian, even as both worked toward
a larger inclusiveness of explanatory purview. Hence the assertion that
"everything is political" is at the level of intellectual and cultural pathol–
ogy the functional equivalent of the return of the repressed; perhaps it
would be more salient to remark that it is like a bad penny turning up
aga1l1.
What moves large numbers - if not all - of those who adhere to
soft totalitarian convictions is first a shared sense of victimhood. Such
presentment of ill-usage is what tends to join and shape those' who share
it into a group. The form favored by such groups is extremely likely to
be that of a "community," a
Cel11einschajt
no less. Those unfortunate
members of our society who have been born with or who have acquired
- through whatever agency or combination of natural and human causes
- physical handicaps now belong to what they themselves describe as
"the disability community." No one can or should blame them for the
anger and resentment they bear against nature for their disadvantaged
physical state, and against social institutions for treating them as being less
than fully endowed in their humanity. At the same time, and in the next
breath, that "community" of the disabled rejects the idea of disability it–
self and demands that it be publicly renamed as the "differently abled," as
if the altered nomenclature had some indescribable power to abolish the
condition by renaming it. At the end of this line of inelegant variations
is the by-now-famous suggestion that very short people are henceforward
to be thought of, and referred to, as "vertically challenged" - perhaps
"specially non-tall" might have done almost as well. One of the striking
things about such examples is the extraordinary insensitivity to language
and the common idiom that they revea l; it's almost as if there were a
counter-linguistic spirit impelling such locutions and ensuring that they
be obtrusive, inept and self-defeating. Another is their immunity to the
apprehension that such expressions, in their awkwardness and absurdity,
are often open invitations to harsh and virtually irresistible humor and
ridicule. Indeed it is the humorlessness, the lack of comic or ironic self–
awareness, that is often most arresting about politically correct language ,
rhetoric and terminology.
It
shares this incapacity with other historical
orthodoxies, one of the compelling characteristics of group thought ap–
parently being that it does not come with a sense of humor as standard
