PG

From The Los Angeles Times:

For the last few years, reasonable people of various ideological leanings have been lamenting the scourge that is the word “problematic.” Cropping up particularly in online discussions about social justice and unacknowledged privilege, “problematic” is sort of like “utilize” for the Smuggy McSanctipants set. It’s an unnecessary expansion on a better, simpler word, a piece of linguistic overreach favored by those who are trying to sound smarter and more sure of themselves than they are. For instance, the augmented-reality game “Pokemon Go” has been attacked for a lot of sins, such as excluding people with limited mobility and inserting itself into inappropriate locations. For those who can’t come up with such specifics but still think the game portends the end of the world, “problematic” covers a lot of bases.

Urban Dictionary, that indispensable compendium of vernacular terms and usages, defines “problematic” as “a corporate-academic weasel word used mainly by people who sense that something may be oppressive, but don’t want to do any actual thinking about what the problem is or why it exists.”

That may be a little harsh, because these days a great number of people are doing a great deal of useful thinking about all manner of oppression. But it’s hard not to agree with the definition’s essence: “Problematic” is a weasel word.

What’s more, as I’ve observed it, “problematic” tends to get used in inverse proportion to the seriousness of the offense.

We don’t hear “problematic” applied to police shootings of unarmed black men or to legislation preventing transgender people from using certain bathrooms. (The operative description of those issues would be, respectively, “actual problem” and “stupid.”) We certainly don’t hear it when the topic is international finance or the NFL because most people who use “problematic” can’t be bothered to follow such things. In the last few months the word has been applied, with some fanfare, to Calvin Trillin, who published a poem about Chinese food in the New Yorker that was deemed racist, and to Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, whom fans are unhappy about because … I have no idea.

“Problematic” as the rallying cry of sanctimonious posturing is nothing new. In 2013, Gawker named it one of the worst words of the year. The satirical Tumblr site, everythingsaproblem, hilariously sends up “call out culture” with pitch-perfect deconstructions of identity politics that require “problematic.” Example: According to everythingsaproblem, the type of cuddling known as spooning, which one culture critic called a “fundamentally sexist arrangement,” represents the “deeply problematic way that power structures propagate themselves.”

Until recently, my problem with “problematic” mostly had to do with the moralizing, condescending and reliably humorless people using it. But when I thought more about it (and, yes, I recognize that sitting around thinking about “problematic” might itself be called problematic), I realized what we really need to do is look at so-called problematic things through a different lens: not as something we’ve labeled and figured out but as the exact opposite.

Think about it: Much of what is deemed problematic is really just complicated, it’s interesting. In a less fragile and reactionary culture we might call these things “worthy of discussion.” But discussion — you know, where people take turns talking and listening — has gone out of style.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Times

From Macleans:

The word “problematic” has become problematic. 2015 may go down as the year when there was a backlash against how much this term was being used, particularly in online writing. Comedian Patton Oswalt’s 53-part Twitter essay (yes, 53 parts) against politically correct comedy included the line “parts 28 through 36 will simply be the word ‘problematic.’ ” And the conservative tumblr Everything’s a Problem! ranks Internet outrage targets on a scale of one to four Problematics. Even Buzzfeed, a site that has done much to popularize the word — with listicles such as “10 Extremely Problematic Realities about Latinos in Hollywood” and “The 24 Most Problematic Girlfriends in Popular Music” — ran a self-parodic article this year called “20 Things That Are Highly Problematic.” It’s a sign of how, in the online era, a word can suddenly go from obscure jargon to overused cliché and back again. But where did “problematic” come from, and why did it turn into such a, well, problem?

Before getting to that, let’s look at what “problematic” means when we say it these days. It’s currently used as an adjective to describe something that in some way—through its meaning, or the unstated assumptions behind it—reinforces unjust beliefs or an unfair system. In other words, “problematic” is an umbrella term meaning anything that is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It doesn’t always mean racist or sexist, though it certainly can. But mostly it means something that helps perpetuate racism or sexism.

Here are a couple of examples. The first one is the earliest I’ve seen, quoted in this 2014 piece on the history of the term.

As he steps into this arena to partake of its explanatory fruits he must necessarily step into its many academic bogs as well. Of this there can be no avoidance. This is because being Mexican-American alone does not dispel the problematic characteristics of social science research in general. In this light this issue of El Grito speaks directly to some of the problems that are to be encountered by Mexican-American social scientists in the production of objective and scholarly research on the Mexican-American.

The argument there is that social science, as a field, reflects certain biases against Mexican-Americans, and those biases (which will show up even in studies undertaken by Mexican-American social scientists) are what make the field “problematic.” It’s from 1970, but that’s how the word is still used today: to shift the conversation from individual fault to structural bias. The writer isn’t calling social scientists racists; he’s saying that there are “problematic” aspects to the research they produce.

Now, jumping forward to our time, the popular video game review series Tropes vs. Women (which points out “problematic” tropes in video games and suggests how they could tell their stories better) has a disclaimer explaining that the reviews are not condemning the games or the people who enjoy them. It includes this sentence:

This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s [sic] more problematic or pernicious aspects.

So that’s how we hear it now, but the operative word is now. We weren’t hearing it much in the ’00s. The Urban Dictionary, a cynical, lewd but useful guide to when people became aware enough of certain terms to start posting about them, didn’t have an entry for this definition of “problematic” until May 18, 2011, when someone called it “A corporate-academic weasel word used mainly by people who sense that something may be oppressive, but don’t want to do any actual thinking about what the problem is or why it exists. Also frequently used in progressive political settings among White People of a Certain Education to avoid using herd-frightening words like ‘racist’ or ‘sexist.’ “ Google shows that interest in the term spiked around that time and has been going up ever since. And in the New York Times, uses of the word were rare before 1970, and have become incredibly frequent since 2010.

So how did a word that was mostly used in academic journals and left-wing newsletters become part of the mainstream language? The date on that first quote I mentioned, 1970, may offer a clue. What we may be seeing here, in microcosm, is what happened to a word when the 1960s left became the establishment, particularly at universities. As time goes on, there are more professors, writers, and thinkers who use the term every day, and more students who pick up this formulation.

One of the places where “problematic” is most popular, apart from the Buzzfeed-style think piece, is Tumblr. And part of the significance of Tumblr is that it has helped import academic jargon into the mainstream. Terms like “erase” (to refer to downplaying or forgetting about non-whiteness or non-white people) or “male gaze,” which used to be mostly academic terms, are now routinely used outside the classroom. There used to be a sense that the university and the so-called real world were separate, and that the words you used in your academic discussions or writing weren’t necessarily the words you’d use in a mainstream forum – you’d say the same things, of course, but you’d use words that were more familiar to the mainstream. In our fragmented era, it’s more acceptable to write for a niche audience that understands the nuances of the terms you’re using. But the Internet has a way of taking niche words to people who might never have used them before, and integrating it into their conversation. So you have a term that goes from the universities to the Internet to the real world.

Now, why is this such a popular word to use? The main reason, I think, is that it’s vague enough to be gentle and not hurt anyone’s feeelings. Saying “problematic” is meant to avoid more loaded terms like racist or sexist or homophobic or colonialist. The advantage of this is that when you use those more specific, negative terms, someone is going to take offence, and the whole discussion will devolve into an argument about what constitutes racism or sexism, who gets to define, it, and so on. With “problematic,” you’re avoiding this explosion, avoiding the implication that it’s anyone’s fault in particular, and not even getting too deep into what kind of problem it is.

Link to the rest at Macleans

From The Atlantic:

When people use the academic term problematic, they should say what they’re objecting to.

Academics like me love to describe things as “problematic.” But what do we mean? We’re not saying that the thing in question is unsolvable or even difficult. We’re saying—or implying—that it is objectionable in some way, that it rests uneasily with our prior moral or political commitments.

For instance, when I described applying Ancient Greek free-speech ideals to social media as “problematic” in a recent article, I wasn’t saying that Socrates’s audience was impossible to please. I was saying that these practices were premised on exclusion in a way that modern egalitarians won’t like. Or when my Oxford colleague Amia Srinivasan describes stand-up comedy in Los Angeles as “problematic,” she’s not saying that she struggled to understand the jokes. She’s saying that they relied on sexism in a way that she—and everyone—should find morally bad.

In principle, every usage of the term problematic should be followed by an explanation. Is the situation or person in question unjust, immoral, or unfair? Racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted? Wrongheaded, perhaps, or just plain wrong? All too often, the explanation never comes.

Snark artists on Tumblr have parodied pretentious, pejorative uses of problematic for years. Yet today, they are as popular in mainstream publications as with professors. According to a recent article in Scientific American, JEDI is “problematic” as an acronym for “Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” initiatives because, among other issues, the Jedi protagonists in Star Wars employ “toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution.” Elsewhere, we’re told that the facial features of Bond villains are “problematic” because they cast aspersions on people with disfigurements, or that West Virginia’s long history with the coal industry is “problematic”—at least,according to members of the Rockefeller family.

Which other academic buzzword can boast of going so decisively and pervasively mainstream? Conventionally, problematic just means “presenting a problem or difficulty,” a usage that The Oxford English Dictionary traces back to 1609. But this definition can’t explain the word’s current popularity.

Like the verb problematize, the adjective problematic came into its own in the 1980s with the importation of French structuralism into American academia. The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault presented “problematization” as a process whereby something previously taken for granted comes to be understood as a problem to be addressed.

We ultimately owe problematic, however, not to Foucault, but to his Marxist colleague Louis Althusser, for whom the phrase la problematique described a structured, theoretical system through which ideas are processed. Incidentally, Althusser also strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, to death in 1980. The fact that many who embrace his terminology today would now reflexively describe Althusser himself as “problematic”—instead of “misogynistic” or “violent”—illustrates how successfully the word has slipped the bonds of social theory to become an all-purpose term not of art but of opprobrium.

Problematic may have escaped the academy, but scholars and teachers still bear a lot of responsibility for its current use. Like any casual Twitter user, academics use problematic as an innuendo, or better yet, an “insinuendo.” Rhetorically, this usage divides our audiences between those who know already what our commitments are—in many cases because, on a politically homogeneous campus, they share them—and so are presumptively in the know about what we find objectionable. To this audience, problematic indicates where the problem is; they do not need to be told what it is.

. . . .

In effect, problematic communicates that those who don’t share our commitments at the outset are not wortharguing with, let alone persuading. It relies on a subtle sort of bullying in place of mutual justification. It excludes,rather than explains.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

From Electric Lit:

Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma offers no easy answers when considering the art of wrongdoers. Across thirteen chapters, Dederer unpacks the complex legacies of a variety of artists—Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, J.K. Rowling, Picasso, Michael Jackson, and many more—with unfailing wit and nuance. Threaded throughout this exploration of genius, creation, and monstrosity is her own history as a consumer, student, critic, mother, and writer in her own right. As Dederer openly wrestles with questions of fandom and morality, Monsters serves as an undeniable reminder that our biographies are inextricable from our experience of the art we love.

Monsters provides a roadmap for readers who are interested in thinking through the subtleties of Dederer’s questions and willing to sit with the resulting discomfort. “The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one,” she writes. “You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.” As Dederer’s own biography shapes her considerations of capitalism, criticism, and time itself, Monsters offers a deeply personal testament of one fan’s multifaceted relationship to the art of imperfect people.

I spoke with Dederer over Zoom about her experience of going viral, fame’s relationship to art, and the thorny intersections of capitalism and love.

. . . .

Abigail Oswald: How did the viral response to your Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” feed into the way you crafted Monsters? 

Claire Dederer: Every writer knows that having a viral piece is both a dream and a nightmare. Here’s the deal with that piece, I wrote this book called Love and Trouble about predation of young women—girls, really—in the 1970s, and a theme of the book was sort of “What is it like to be an adult who had that experience, and how did it affect my sexuality?” And in that book I really engaged with Roman Polanski. He’s used in the book as a kind of straw man, and also as kind of a person I’m in dialogue with. So by the time I’d finished that book, I really knew everything there was to know about Roman Polanski’s rape of the young girl, and yet I was still watching the films. So I started writing Monsters, I’m gonna say in 2016. And just really sitting with this question of what is happening when I consume this work. What do I feel like? What’s my experience of it? How does my idea of him alter me as an audience member? 

So that essay was never conceived as an essay. It was always conceived as the first chapter of the book. I had really approached the subject with curiosity, without an axe to grind, without something I was trying to prove, but with this very exploratory mindset, and I think that’s why the essay did well. I think it was because it was nuanced, and the nuance didn’t come from me being some genius, the nuance came simply from the fact that it was something I’ve been working on for years. But it looked like it was in response to the moment, and so for me that was a really interesting experience—almost more as a citizen than as an artist myself—because it was really heartening, actually, to have something in the current information economy that was super nuanced and had a really strong positive response, right. I don’t mean to be Pollyanna-ish or like, bright side of miserable topic, but that made me feel both excited about my work, but also excited that there was a potential for a more complex dialogue. And so that was my initial response.

Then I had this experience of the ways in which there were feminists who had a problem with the essay. There was a response that was like, don’t totalize these kinds of offenses. And I was like, well, clearly I didn’t make that point clearly enough. So that was great, I could take that on board and think about it for the final book, which, as you’ve seen, I feel like I’ve wrestled with it. And there was just this constant barrage of Woody Allen defenders and men’s rights people and accounts being set up to attack me. Which speaks to my larger point, which is there’s something about our subjective emotional collapse with this work that is undeniable and profound, which I saw in all these accounts being set up to attack me. 

So, as I proceeded working on the book, [I was guided by] the knowledge that nuance and a really deep exploration was going to be my watchword. It took me five years to write the book.

AO: Part of the modern rise in this conversation about the artist’s biography can be attributed to changes in media consumption and the sheer contemporary accessibility of said biography. How would you say the more widespread accessibility of biography has affected our sense of responsibility as consumers? 

CD: One of the central ideas of the book is the idea that we don’t strive for biography, it happens to us. That biography is like an ongoing natural disaster—just befalls us, right? And that we don’t really get to choose that. So in terms of how I personally approach knowing things about the people whose art I consume, I feel like choice is not part of it. It just happens. The plight of the audience member, as I see it in this book and as I explore it in this book, is this person to whom the knowledge has already happened. So then, what do you do with it? 

What effect do I think that has on our experience of art? I think that the answer to that is, first of all, taking a step back and saying it does have an effect on our experience of art. The initial question that sort of comes up over and over—or used to, I think it’s slightly more nuanced now—is “Can you separate the art from the artist?” And that’s one of the first principal questions this book asks. And because I believe that biography befalls us, and because I believe we can’t pull out our response to the biography, I think the decision to separate is a flawed decision. It’s a failure before it begins. I think my first response is that we respond with that biography on our minds, whether we want to or not. And then the question for the audience is what do you do with that knowledge? Do you acknowledge it and consume the work anyway? Do you not watch the work because it’s too painful? Do you not watch the work because you’re making an ethical stand? And I think there’s as many answers to that question as there are viewers, readers, listeners… 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG has mentioned this before, but he has found very few people to like who make regular use of problematic.