----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Smith" <mjs at smithbowen.net>
Comparatively few natural-language words have really clear and distinct definitions. So it is with "PC". In my dialect -- based on my own limited experience -- the term denotes a phenomenon, centered on (but not entirely confined to) university campuses in the 80s and early 90s. Qua politics, it was not really very "left" as I understand that (equally vague) term, but constituted a kind of militant liberalism.
The praxis was largely, as far as I could tell, a matter of policing diction -- certain words and phrases were disapproved-of, including a good many ancient vernacular expressions.
Ideologically, notions like "identity" and "sensitivity" loomed very large, and distinguishing oppressed groups from oppressing groups seemed to be a fundamental heuristic.
This all seemed very shallow, moralistic, un-structural, and ahistorical to me. As such, it seemed like an awfully easy target for reactionaries, and so it proved to be.
American campuses are a very weird hermetic world, and I feel personally quite fortunate to have gotten over the wall when I did. Does it really make a lot of sense to spend much time defending these salons des precieuses?
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That's not how I remember it. What I remember is a great upswelling of protest in the late sixties and seventies, which was ghettoized and kettled in the various "oppressed" studies departments at the universities. Something that could have coalesced in a social revolutionary movement was parcelled into various pieces of real estate whose boundaries were defended by various flavors of lexical privilege and whose survival still depended on grants and administrative forbearance. Classic divide and conquer, a process in which the beleaguered academic ghettos were structurally forced to be complicit.
They were much more successful with this in the U.S., whose population has little sense of history and class consciousness, than in Europe.
Joanna