Art, Power, and the Language of "Harm"

Michelle Goldberg describes the latest squabble over art and “harm” on American campuses (NY Times): 

The work of the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand is cheeky, erotic and defiantly anticlerical. One painting in her new midcareer survey, “Taravat,” incorporates Iranian bank notes whose images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini have been dosed with LSD. A graphite drawing, titled “Blasphemy X,” depicts a veiled woman giving the finger while lifting her robe to reveal high heels and a flash of underwear. There are sculptures of women in niqab face coverings with enormous exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of Iran’s recent nationwide protests against the morality police, is written in neon in English and Persian.

When “Taravat” opened late last month at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in St. Paul, Minn., with a focus on internationalism, some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress, and thus of them. They expressed their outrage, and this month Macalester responded by temporarily closing Talepasand’s show, and then, apparently unaware of the irony, surrounding the gallery windows with black curtains.

Well, yes, I suppose the exhibit does mock conservative Muslims. But with specific reference to what is going on in Iran now, and if these students don't understand that Iranian women are being beaten up and worse for refusing to cover themsevles, somebody should be telling them.

And this gets at what is so creepy about this whole discourse: the way claims of “harm” translate so easily into demands for power over others.

There was actually a tie-in between this blow-up and the other recent fracas over Islam at a liberal arts college, since it turned out that some of the students who were angered by a 14th-century image of the prophet Muhammad had also seen “Taravat” and were upset about that, too. This came up in the campus meeting held to discuss the incident:

“I invited them [the Muslim students] to share what emotions they were holding in their bodies,” one faculty member wrote in an email, part of which was shared with Talepasand. “They named ‘undervalued, frustrated, surprised, disrespected, ignored, and it felt like hit after hit.’”

And this, I submit, is exactly what millions of Americans feel all the time, from farmers and conservative Christians to older women and black feminists. The language of “harm” weaponizes those feelings, turning them into clubs people use to beat their opponents into submission. Or at least drive them off campus. The contemporary American battle-cry is, “the way you are talking is hurting me.”

One danger of this discourse recently popped up in some department or other at a California university, which asked professors to stop referring to their “fields,” since the word might cause harm to black people by reminding them of slavery. The university repudiated that particular claim, but it was a reminder that this notion can be extended almost indefintely. A society devoted to never harming anyone would end up like that joke in Sense and Sensibility, where somebody says that all polite conversation should be limited to the weather and the state of the roads.

The left-wing discourse generally focuses on protecting certain categories of people who have a tough time in our world, but the blow-up over “Taravat” is a perfect reminder that the world is not so neatly divided. Who has a better claim to our sympathy, the Muslim women who identify with the victims of the Iranian state, or those who feel mocked and isolated for following their religious norms? These conflicts over who really needs protection are one of our age's defining issues. The tension between African Americans and Jews goes back nearly a century now, that between native born blacks and Asian immigrants at least 40 years. An issue that comes up over and over on campuses is bad feeling between sensitive female students who feel threatened by rowdy masculinity and male black and Hispanic students who think fear of their rowdiness is just racism. Trumpism can be seen as an assertion by white Americans and especially rural white Americans that they have feelings, too, which liberals and city folks keep hurting.

I am not, most of the time, interested in art that shocks on purpose. I want us to all get along and have a civilization together, and that usually means trying to be nice. But sometimes, shock is necessary. Raw, ugly videos have had a huge impact on Americans' view of the police, and I would not support suppressing them because they hurt the feelings of cops. I think the events in Iran are horrible and despicable and fully deserve any shocking attack anyone can throw at them, and I am not in the mood to accommodate anybody whose feelings end up as collateral damage.