when words wither

on "privilege"

the liar’s language and on slogans explored the transmissions of language between people and society. The way the (inter)personal pollinates the societal fascinates me, however I fear my irked demeanour in those essays may have prevented me from articulating a fuller breadth of my reflections. It is not something I’m certain I’ll rectify in what I consider the last essay of this linguistic trilogy but I’ll try, especially as I’ve been reflecting a lot on an interaction I had last week:

I think sometimes we don’t have the language for something—especially something that is a vision we have, that is new and isn’t tangible yet, and we have to use the best language we can to get us there. — Renee Marino

I have learnt and forgotten more words than faces of acquaintances. I’ve excommunicated words for crimes as petty as going out of style or my own misuse of them in public—vowing to never utter their shapes again in a silent monument to my own shame. I have held words close to my soul for no other reason than their mouth-feel, alphabetical pleasantness and serendipitous integrity. (Opalescent is one of my favourite words and I learnt it before I discovered opal was my birthstone.)

“We are transformed by words every single day” is a truth I often recite and such transformation is made all the more profound when something you never had the words to illuminate is bestowed a name.

---

For me, Jean-François Lyotard’s libidinal economy¹ (Peewee Hermeneutics alerted me this concept has had a recent uptick in pop-cultural essays) which is concerned with what Foucault pronounced “the flow of desire” was particularly eye-opening.

There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the preconscious investments "ought to be." That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.²

It seems simple; the fact we are driven by desires that overwrite our more urgent or substantial interests is something I personally saw everywhere—have even participated in—but never had the language to name. The yearning of instant gratification over long-term gains. Why do people smoke knowing its mollywhopping their health? (As is the Inigo way, there is definitely an essay-shaped rant within me to explore the culture-wide suicidal ideation of western society—but not today because never today.) The ‘libidinal economy’ provided me a way of seeing why people made socio-political decisions so contrary to their social location.

---

As an artsy nigga generally disinterested in the rigidity of academia but who’s instead just curious about making sense of the world and its pageantries—I patchwork the things I read with ways I understand the world to build myself a lens to witness life and navigate it. If we do want to get academic about it—The thing beneath the thing I mentioned in the liar’s language could very much be described as an underworld administration governed by Lyotard’s libidinal economy, Jungian phenomenologies of the shadow self³, the anti-Black foundations of Wilderson’s Afropessimism⁴ and the consumptive logic underpinning Joy James’ Captive Maternals⁵.

I pilgrimage towards theories that clarify the fog of my eye. I seek the right words, trying them on like floral hats to see if they fit me. I do away with them if I find they don’t fit as well as I hoped or don’t seem as flattering as I thought. Perhaps that is a luxury that comes with being someone so enamoured with the curvature of words. They are as ephemeral as picked flowers.

In that respect, I get why saying “terms like ‘joy is an act of resistance’ have made us complacent about actual resistance” might’ve been a challenging thing to be confronted by. Joy as an act of resistance has been a liberatory recalibration in the mind-space for many. The resistance to my reflection—the potential loss—makes sense. I have empathy for those who see a random but dashingly handsome stranger yapping on Substack about something they believe in—pointing at it and saying, that’s not right when it has been so transformative.

I am not interested in policing how anyone conceptualises, articulates or practices joy. I am concerned in how we rebel, especially when it comes to using sustainable, emotional fuel to power our resistances. Somewhere down the time-line of peaceful protesting, we’ve seemed to absorb the belief that juvenile provocation of our enemies is tantamount to defeating them. We need to relinquish that belief. All our lives depend on it. The planet is being chauffeured into the fever of the sun and I don’t believe joy can be the rallying cry that gets us to kick these motherfuckers out of the driving seat (even if I’d very much rejoice at the sight of them falling out the car door and rolling along the asphalt in my rearview mirror.)

To know the ephemeral limits of words doesn’t mean I yearn less for the preservation of the original intention. It doesn’t mean a word like woke isn’t a tragedy I feel a pang for whenever I hear it used in its gentrified and phlegm-ridden form. Perhaps, I have my own internal metric system of what to grieve and when. I try to have an unsentimental acceptance of time’s ravaging; which means not fighting for words, terminologies or slogans but for the intangible truths they represent—to speak my experience closer to them, to evaluate and re-evaluate their functionality, to articulate them better, to enlighten with them more.

---

One term that could do with re-evaluation is privilege. In my early, autodidactic education of anti-Blackness, white privilege exploded in popularity, proving instrumental in lieu of other ways of naming the omnipresence of white supremacy. In an episode of the Overthink Podcast, Lewis Gordon articulates my qualms perfectly:

The word privilege is constantly used in a way that buys into a notion that not only personalises it but if you think about the things that are associated with the privileges, we have to ask seriously if those are things that people shouldn't have. Everything that I've seen or heard about when people talk about, say, “white privilege”, refers either to something everyone should have—like clean water, education, fair treatment in courts, employment, etc—or to something no one should have. For instance, the behaviour of Donald Trump or the Ku Klux Klan. It strikes me that it's not productive to get into the white privilege discourse. If people are designated white, then at that moment, the only way you could say they could not have this so called “privilege” is to stop being white in a society that's constructed them as such. It seems to me it's more productive to have formulations over things people can actually do and act upon. And this is one of the reasons why I prefer to address questions of license, because you see when certain people are exempt from accountability, then their actions slide into license.⁶

In one social location (Blackness), I am “marginalised” and in another (masculinity), I am “top” of the power structure. Inhabiting both with an above-average level of social awareness means I can tell you—the construct of masculinity is no privilege to live inside. Stray from the unwritten laws of traditional manhood and you are shunned, alienated, attacked and in extreme circumstances, killed. Adherence to certain subsections of their laws might get you killed quicker anyway. The ways to be a man—a societally triumphant man—rely on adhering to a rigid and narrow ideal that has been erected by cruel and violent men and sustained for millennia. In this vein, we all fundamentally misunderstand the constraints of manhood, we misunderstand why so many boys fail in schools, turn to the manosphere and grow into men who are killing themselves out of a seemingly inescapable loneliness. The unsustainable construct of patriarchy that is deemed a privilege is poisoning men from the inside out and the men who are immune to its poison become so tapped that it propels them to victory in the world’s most disgusting game.

Most men fail the game. Overt rejection of the game is an isolating endeavour. You are viewed with healthy suspicion by non-men who’ve also resolved to build their own game or make their own rules. You are viewed with vitriol by men who believe the game is the only way and hate you for wanting to reject it. Finding other men who reject the game and are in a place to foster brotherhood with you is like finding a hay flake in a stack of needles. I digress… The world weighs on everyone.

My point is: privilege became a word so crucial in naming power imbalances, so pivotal in the socio-political education of so many, yet draws such an incomplete picture of these oppressive constructs. Be it patriarchy, whiteness, heterosexuality or otherwise, these constructs are omni-directionally destructive and ‘privilege’ does a really bad job at articulating the extent of the detriment. I’d go as far to say that its explanatory shortcomings have contributed to our current political moment.

If you care about racial issues and have been online in the last decade, you’ve likely had an exchange with a white person who doesn’t get the term white privilege. They probably said to you, “how can I be privileged if I’m broke?” and you probably tried to find a graceful way to say, “despite being broke, you still have more opportunities than a broke person who’s more marginalised than you.” If you were lucky, this would lead them to a revelatory moment. The more likely outcome is that they doubled down. Discussions like this are the stuff of legends now. Only sequestered echo-chambers remain. The membrane between shit-posting trolls and disgruntled MAGA enthusiasts is so thin that a Venn diagram of them might as well be a perfect circle.

When Gordon says that privilege discourse is unproductive, I immediately think about how people who’re struggling will rarely put aside their immediate circumstances to think about a hypothetical other, let alone take kindly to being told they are privileged. Still privilege has become a widespread, idealistic spore ejection into the cultural zeitgeist’s airways all the same, and we should observe and reckon with the consequences of it.

Each of us are stuck on a complex web of oppression that, for comprehension’s sake, we reduce to a hierarchical ladder. Privilege helps comprehend the ladder but does a pretty rubbish job at articulating the web, which is comprised of structural beams like class, race, gender, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, etc but also relies heavily on an underworld administration to all these things—willpower, capacity to manipulate, beauty and charisma to name a few. All of this dictates how comfortable one is able to exist under the kyriarchy of modern life. And most people are simply fucking struggling.

White male shooters like Dylann Roof who are apprehended alive or men like Brock Turner who get a slap on the wrist for sexual assault are not privileged—deeming them so implies that privilege is the freedom to inflict harm (which strikes me as profoundly colonial logic). Gordon would suggest these men are socially granted a “license” that makes them “exempt from accountability”:

A good example is if we think of lynching. If you look at most lynchings that occurred, the perpetrators posed in front of all of the corpses, in front of the victims they have butchered. It's very easy to find the people who committed those actions. They're right there. They posed for it. Yet, they were immune. They went home. They were perfectly fine. That's a license.
The truth is: nobody should have that license. —Lewis Gordon

Privilege as a cultural mechanism has undoubtedly had a great impact in educating many about the nature of oppression but its observable downsides have made communication between people across differing demographics hostile. I don’t think it’s controversial to admit that the linguistics of social justice has alienated a large portion of the western public—to the point where they’re willing to parade around the word woke as a ritual sacrifice. Desires for a “Leftist Joe Rogan” are ultimately saying: how do we show the importance of pursuing virtues like genuinely caring for marginalised people, tackling the out-of-control class inequality and protecting the only viable environment our species has for a gazillion miles without sounding so motherfucking insufferable? The truth is: I have no earthly idea. But the things that aren’t working, should shed their skin. We must let things die and try something new.

In the pursuit of a better world, where words transform us everyday, I perhaps have more questions than I do answers. How are we comprehending our successes and failures in the societal realm of language? If we are failing, what course-corrections do we actively need to implement? What ways of speaking do we need to invent? Has the traditional adherence to the left/right political paradigm outstayed its welcome? Should we stop parroting the thought experiments of old, dead white men and inhabit our modern times—not in petulant rejection of the old but in principled and accessible evolution from their ideas? What tactics have worked that we need to hammer away at until we strike gold? What do we need to let go of? How do we want to speak to each other as teammates? How do we want to speak about each other? How do we want to treat enemies? How do we discern the difference? How do we want to relate to each other in a way where we can convert enemies into teammates? Which of us is best suited for that work? What is the work? Who do we want to dedicate our speaking to? Where do we want to channel our love, our joy, our rest? How do we want to resist? Do you look at the world and see a beast too massive to confront? Do you believe we have already lost? Are we all simply coping, waiting to be kissed by the surface of the sun? Do you feel guilt for not being able to do more? For not wanting to do more? When you think about the state of the world, are you governed by shame? Are we? Am I? What should we do?

Words will wither.
Others grow in their place.
Questions always rise.
I will be asking more.

1. Jean François Lyotard, (1993) — Libidinal economy

2. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, (1983) — Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia

3. C.G Jung, (1959) — Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self

4. Frank Wilderson III, (2017)— Afropessimism: An Introduction — Wilderson et al

5. Joy James (2016) — The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal

6. David M. Peña-Guzmán & Ellie Anderson, (2024) — Overthink Podcast Episode 117: Black Consciousness with Lewis Gordon