[Reader-list] <no subject>

[nishit saran]

On 12/4/02 7:52 PM, tarunksaint at tarunksaint at sify.com wrote:

> Will this serve as an
> encouragement to contribute in future to the many silent witnesses to what
> has become a distasteful online spectacle?


Hello all, 

I am totally a lurker and I have been a lurker all my list-life...

Because I am quite nervous that contributing to this list will expose me to
the most vitriolic kind of criticism, thanks to the "prove yourself and then
speak" kind of pressures that this list seems to exert... (a list that,
after all, is not comprised solely of university professors or PhDs)...

Pressures that have received their final confirmation for me, courtesy
Professor Saint's most recent contribution...

Dear Professor Saint,

Words like distasteful, crass, sophisticated, vulgar, nonsense, goon,
lumpen, dignified, rude, third-rate, and so on ( to sample from your email),
all make me feel like I am in Madame Verdurin's salon; like I need class
credentials (understood of course, chez Verdurin, as intellectual
credentials) to speak at all.

And that makes me pat myself on the back from being a lurker.

Dignified? Goon? Lumpen? These are your criteria against argument, sir?
Sounds more like a case of not letting 'browns' into the building... purely
making an analogy.

If this list is not to remain an old boys-and-girls network (which is not to
say that the list must have 'expansionist' plans)...

If this list aims to encourage fresh voices to put in fresh inputs...

Then one must allow the 'distasteful' (who are, after all, those who haven't
yet mastered someone's particular markers of taste) to speak.

I mean, what is the real risk?  Don't you think that anyone who has bothered
to subscribe to the list has some care for matters intellectual... that
anyone who just wanted to spread smut would fare better on Indiatimes Chat?

Some of us (and unfortunate we might be for that reason) might share the
same views as PP. But when we voice them, if we are going to be accused in
all thes elitist terms instead of being responded to, then we might as well
not write at all. A banal point, I agree, but from my perspective, a valid
one. 

(And, before I myself am accused of class/intellectual pretension because I
alluded to Mme Verdurin, let me state for those who have not read Proust -
and not reading Proust, I shall hope, no more disqualifies one than having
read and liked Rabelais -  Mme Verdurin had a rather sad though, in the end,
successful salon made of 'intellectuals' who were disgruntled with the more
- in her opinion - bland tastes of the 'best society.')

PP should be allowed to satirize - and satirize distastefully and vulgarly
and 'lumpenly' and 'goonly' - for the simple reason that: not all might
possess the refinement that you seemingly do, sir, nor might care to.

After all, one man's basic courtesy is another man's foppishness. (Some
would call it basic courtesy, we know, to refer to ambassadors as Your
Excellency, but their passports would just call them Mr. or Ms.)

"Can there be no absolute basic min-ee-mum courtesy?" you ask then,
frustrated with moral relativism when it applies to netiquette but perhaps
not when it applies to grander things? (What was that about a laissez-faire
moral economy?)

I think not, sir, none more than the base effort of joining the list. Unless
the rules of joining the list themselves changed. Unless there was a
committee that reviewed your application to the list. Again I ask you, sir:
who will extend perversity to such an abstracted level - contributing to a
list like this one, and simply being malicious without earnestly feeling
that they had something important to say?

And if netiquette itself must be relativist... (Spend some time in a Boston
gay chatroom and follow it up with a Delhi one, sir, and you shall see that
indeed it must)...

Then, what if, what if...? What if someone says anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim
or (God forbid) homophobic things here tomorrow? Or produces madness, such
as a whole posting of four letter words? Oh well, la dee da. It's not the
end of the world, plus I am sure that the event will spur enough effective
discourse from all quarters for there to be no further argument.

It's just a matter of reading and believing and writing and connecting to
your ISP after all. No children have been hurt in the typing of this
posting.  

Yes, I too should not make a big deal of your writing. You, too, should be
'allowed' to use your 'vulgar' and 'third-rate' and 'lumpen' and 'goon.' Of
course you should - it's certainly not the end of MY world. All I am trying
to explain is why you confirm my faith in lurking.

And, if everything I am saying merely signifies to you that I myself am as
distasteful and vulgar and lumpen and goonish as PP... in that case, sir, I
want to ask you: just because I am these things, should I not be allowed to
speak? 

"Not at all," you say, "Speak all you want. But I will not 'dignify' you
with a response." 

Charming, I say. Very Madame Verdurin.

Don't respond, sir, that's fine. But at least don't DO respond and then
CLAIM that it is beneath your dignity to respond. Even Mme Verdurin would
disapprove of that.

- Nishit Saran


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