appeals to what a speech-act clearly is not only rely on some standard for empirically judging what’s there and what isn’t, but it’s impossible to actually find or define that standard, outside of ever-increasingly authoritative assertions that it is so. People have claimed that the stupid Onion tweet was clearly satire, but there is no evidence you can point to in making that claim; you end up, instead, relying on assertions of authority: the joke-teller might claim that it was satire, or a reader might try to explain to you that it was obviously satire. But what they really mean, simply, is that it was satire to them, and that, on that basis, it should be to you as well.Now, the whole post, in its entirety, is essentially the "intent doesn't matter, effects do" argument with a little Roland Barthes sprinkled on top. Which, fine. If you've got a good horse, you might as well ride. Bady is no more guilty here than any of the other people who selectively endorsed this argument a month ago. I will merely echo every other student in a sophomore English seminar in asking whether Bady is not himself making assertions based on authority, and avoiding self-judgment merely by the convenience of his perception of himself as not that kind of guy.
The problem for both Bady and the broader world of social-justice-140-characters-at-a-time is that history exists, and on the Internet, a record exists. The notion that effect is what matters when it comes to The Onion is problematic considering that conservative Christians have been mad at The Onion dozens of times and nobody gives a shit. Google around for 15 seconds and you'll find plenty of outraged, offended Christians who were mad at The Onion. The effect of their work, whatever the intent, was to hurt people. Not one of the people who worked themselves into a self-congratulatory lather over the Quvenzhane Wallis tweet ever took to Twitter to demonstrate their profound moral revulsion at the hurt The Onion had caused. The principle that has been applied to this situation was generated solely for it and immediately discarded. Nobody got outraged about the opinions of people who got offended by The Onion before because the people who did are exactly the people most upwardly-mobile liberals want to separate themselves from.
Now, were it the case that any of these people had actually followed the thinking being applied here to different moments when The Onion had caused offense-- the times when doing so wouldn't have had any positive effect on their status within their social cohort-- I would believe they actually were operating on principle. I would even have been impressed. But they never did, so I don't, and I'm not. In my experience, most self-professed leftists are usually about a beer away from the pure, hateful classism of "white trash," even the boutique Marxists.
Again, the reality is that for many of its loudest proponents, this kind of liberalism is essentially a social affectation. And one of a particular kind: social liberalism, for many, is a class marker. Over time I've come to see most of the cultural attachments of the cash-poor but social-capital-rich white artistic striver types as ways to assure the world that their financial similarity to lower class white people is purely coincidental. In that context, social liberalism becomes a particularly outsized way to demonstrate that you are better than the people with whom you share an income quintile.
Myself, I would argue that, contra Bady, adults can't rely on either pure intent or pure effect, but must muddle through in a world of conflicting ideals and limited information. This stance prohibits me from making any claims of perfect righteousness, but it does give me the flexibility to state my interpretation (MY HEGEMONIC INTERPRETATION THAT I AM APPLYING TO THE WORLD LIKE A FASCIST) that the whole point of The Onion's tweet was, in fact, that we are allowed in our culture to treat actresses like shit, an opinion voiced by many of the people who went after them, and that The Onion was no more "calling Quvenzhane Wallis a cunt" than they actually were claiming that Obama called for reparations the day before the election or whatever else. That's a belief, I think, that other people share, but are afraid to voice. But there I go again! In holding an opinion, I am doing violence to the world of possibility. Call Dr. Bourdieu.
(Incidentally, if history is any guide, you can expect Mike Konczal to have a twitter freakout because I dared to criticize Bady, which he treats as something akin to trafficking in child pornography. I dunno why. Consider yourself warned.)
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