Digress: a departing from the subject of one's discourse.
In 2017, Michelle Moyd and Yuliya Komska warned that fascism proliferates through “redundant, formulaic, aggressive” expression that gradually becomes ordinary through individual everyday repetition. Attempts to parody it, they explained, only “create a distance, as irony does.” They issued an urgent call for “linguistic disobedience,” and specifically, for “proximity,” which they defined as “full language ownership.”
We opened this handbook in 2017 with a defense of irony, which we were careful to distinguish from parody. We described irony as a discomforting moment of intimacy. Irony is the unnerving realization that your very own words have unraveled your position.
Ten years ago, we staked this project on two beliefs, the first being that no one can ever own language. We felt that trying to own language was at the heart of fascism and that people inadvertently fostered fascist sensibilities wherever they tried to pin words down.
Second, we believe that no expression is immune to irony, not even fascism; we found comfort in the ironic nature of human expression. Irony feels immobilizing but we believe it makes departure possible. It opens a hatch, though you must choose to go through it if you wish to escape the dizzying spin of same same.
Ten years on and we see very little interest among anyone in stepping away through any opening. Perhaps, as Moyd and Komska warned, everyone feels they lack the language to do so. Maybe when we peer through the openings the space on the other side appears devoid of any words with which to live by. Moyd and Komska suggest that we begin by speaking of “the simplest of things in the simplest of languages.” That feels like a sure path straight back to fascism.
We believe resistance is not a matter of finding the right words much less owning them. We believe it is a matter of re-inhabiting the words we already have, and that means leaving behind the security of the familiar. We must digress. Wander off. Forget where we were. Starve the subject at hand of any attention. Get lost.
It’s not an expeditious plan, but we’re already ten years in. What’s another ten?