The Problem of Prescription: A Comedy of Errors

I just laid down with my partner to watch Monty Python's The Life of Brian, wondering if I could watch it this time without falling asleep--a difficulty I have always had when trying to enjoy Monty Python endeavors. However, this time around it caught my attention right away, and I was so captivated by this scene I could not continue watching and had to get out my laptop and post about it.





Why is this totally amazing? It demonstrates perfectly the way prescriptive notions about language work actively to disable the disempowered from, as Anne Ruggles Gere says, "alter[ing] the material conditions of their lives."



1. Writer/speaker has a message they want to share: they feel some desire to share something with the world. In this case, explicitly: they are putting words toward political action. I want us to consider, for a second, the idea that all writing is a political action, even when not explicitly about politics or toward a political aim. Politics is, at base level, decisions; all meaningful interconnected strings of words are decided by the writer/speaker, and thus inherently political. (The words we choose, how we situate them in relation to one another, what kinds of ideas we feel are okay to communicate with them, what words exist to describe our most intense experiences.)



2. Writer/speaker, who I will now call "agent," is accosted by the establishment--not for their idea, but for how they are communicating it. The message is not (yet) important, and the agent's life (physically, intellectually) relies merely on the mechanics. The agent's livelihood, or even physical life (ability to speak) is dependent on their ability to correct their spelling and verb tense. The verb doesn't matter, the action (not yet), the life in the words; it is not the act yet but the proper agreement between the act and who is doing it at what point in time and space.



3. The agent survives this round, finds the right tense, though now the tensssssion is internalized. The agent is made to comply with the grammarian's prescription; they attempt to fit their idea into the prescripted forms.



(Additionally, in this scene, the agent is punished by being forced to write the corrected phrase repeatedly--a historic punishment that took teachers way too many years to realize was generating a negative association with the act of composition. Ding!)

4. Upon seeing the revised message, the establishment is in havoc. Now that the message has been corrected, only now when the form requirements have been fulfilled, is the message analyzed for its content. Of course, the content is abhorrent to the establishment. But, the underlying assumption, it seems, is always this: the poor and working people's needs always exist in opposition to the benefits of the establishment, so methods must be found to silence their voices indirectly. Not to shut them up literally through violence (why, if it could be avoided so easily?), but to sustain a societal indifference about how they feel on the basis of some unifying trait.


Enter: the hillbilly, the welfare mother, the dishwasher from Brooklyn.


We are, in so many ways, through so many machinations of largely invisible violence, trained not to care what you say if you can't say it in bourgeois language, because the people who cannot are generally not the bourgeois.

There, I said it.