Marked and Unmarked Defaults
Edvard Munch’s "Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu” — the paintings of Munch are some of the best graphic depictions of absence that I’ve found, and the “unmarked” is just a stone’s throw from the “absent”, in my opinion.
Here and there on this website, I’ve talked about the idea of the “unmarked default” – occasionally the “empty default” – but I think I’ve only obliquely defined it. The time has come to do so. The “unmarked default” is the unspoken condition from which other conditions are deviations: in terms of gender, you often see references to scientists, athletes, and executives – but you also see references to female scientists, female athletes, and female executives. Likewise, you see some of the similar discourse about race, in a more pernicious fashion: not only do the police shoot a man, but they shoot a black man, and for some reason it’s necessary to specify that he is an unarmed black man. As if being white is the default for being a man (I wonder why?), and being armed is the default for being a black man.
This issue has been kicked up for me since Edgar recently finished the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, which I finished earlier this year, so we’ve talked about it a bit. In those novels, the default assumption is that characters are black; only the vanishingly small number of white characters receive much description of skin color. Jemisin casually posits a world where the default is black, and only the rare characters from the polar regions are white, meaning that they become the marked category.
We can move this concept out of simple discussions of race and gender: part of the project of queer studies and related LGBT movements is the decentering of heterosexual and cisgender identities, broadening the default so that categories are no longer inherently marked. This is, obviously, a point of intra-communal disagreement, which I am not wholly qualified to speak on: I can say that the two (rough) sides are those who take a postmodern approach and insist that gender and sexuality are wholly constructs and have no objective reality, while on the other side are those who insist that there is a reality to them beyond the social, simply that it is more complex than the binaries that we have been given.
I think, obviously, this concept can be brought out of identity politics and brought into other areas of inquiry. Whenever considering a system of categorization, some categories are marked: they’re stated and described. Others can’t be. Some categories are unmarked because they are unknown: this disease hasn’t been witnessed before, we’re still trying to figure out what it is. Still others are unmarked because they’re what the others are a deviation from: consider, there are ten thousand thousand different maladies and diseases in the world; how many kinds of health are there? Consider, also, the Anna Kareinina principle, articulated by Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
But is every instance of happiness – even such a narrow category as “familial happiness” – identical? Or is there variation within it?
I would posit that “healthy” and “happy” are minimally-necessary markers for defaults.
I understand that “what is the antonym of crime” is asked by the protagonist of this book — which I’ve heard described as a sort of Japanese equivalent to The Stranger, written in 1948. I’ll need to track it down.
Still other areas have categories that are completely unmarked: consider, what are the antonyms for “liar” or “crime”? Can you answer for either in one, singular word?
Such a concept is a true unmarked default: we struggle to produce a marking for it, to even speak or think of it, largely because we hope to exist in a situation where we only really need to specify when someone is a liar or a crime is committed, and that their opposites becomes as common as air or music.
But it’s been too long since I’ve mentioned politics directly on this blog, so let’s get political (the antonym of political – “apolitical” – seems to be first attested in the 1950s; strangely a lot of people talk about things like the existence of women with agency, black people, and queer people as being “political” lately. I’m going to performatively not know what to say about that because I don’t want to get into it right now). I recently read an article by Jon Schwartz from The Intercept called “Political Correctness Is Destroying America! (Just Not How You Think)” that posited and tried to describe what I would call the “unmarked default” political position in America, which has shifted further and further to the right in the past fifty years (since the end of the Carter presidency, at least).
In this article, Schwartz discusses “conservative political correctness”, which describes the successful campaign to normalize the assumptions that all elected officials should be religious (if not Christian; if not protestant;) the entanglement of that religious sensibility with our aggressive foreign policy and the free hand we take with our military resources; the lionization of police, and the assumption that the rules they have to play by tie their hands unnecessarily; conversely, discuss spending money on anything other than the military or the police and you will be interrogated on where the money will come from.
This basic political position is the unmarked default of American politics, the basic assumptions that both major political parties adhere to.
One other aspect of this that Schwartz brings up is the fact that it is part of this ideological furniture that the Republican party is an actual political party open to debate and compromise, when this is demonstrably not the case. Instead the GOP has refused to compromise on anything material and the end result is that Democrats are afraid of being George McGovern, but not of being Walter Mondale.
It’s an excellent article, but what makes me interested in this is that, taken with the idea of the unmarked default, it suggests that American culture has been the victim of a concerted attack carried out through an innovative method: some of these ideas are fairly new, and were imported into the American psyche by a process of Unmarking.
The Pennsylvania Cossacks, known officially as “The Coal and Iron Police.”
Consider: pro-police sentiment, for a long period of time, was not exactly the most common thing among the working class. Coal miners who immigrated from Eastern Europe referred to police in Pennsylvania as “Cossacks” for a reason. They were also portrayed as villains in 1970s television shows “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “B.J. and the Bear”, as well as films like “First Blood”, or as simply incompetent, as they appear in “The A-Team” and in the earlier Keystone Studios movies. The default anti-police assumption was undermined through a concerted effort, and was replaced with an unmarked assumption that police are “there to help” – which has been very publicly belied in many cities across the country over the past few months.
This wasn’t done by eliminating the original narrative: it was done by simply starting to repeat a new narrative, and within this new narrative was a new marked category. The invention of the “corrupt cop” indicated the existence of a larger category against which it was differentiated. By calling one police character “corrupt” it indicated that the rest – and the system they were a part of – was not corrupt. Thus was modern copaganda invented, and its second order effect, copization.
By marking a subcategory, they allowed the larger category to vanish, and become unmarked. By this mechanism, American culture – which is largely hegemonic throughout the world – was changed.
An important thing to understand, though, is that the “unmarked default” is the meta- (or “grand”) narrative of our day. For those not versed in post-modern theory (if so, nice, good job avoiding it, as it can be a headache,) a meta-narrative is an overriding story that is told again and again. For the past sixteen-hundred years or so, the dominant meta-narratives in the west were the epic cycle of Homer and the Christian Bible (Homer was pretty dominant before the Bible muscled its way in there). It would be a mistake to say that this narrative was unchanged over that long period – the interpretation of scripture altered culture, and commentaries on Homer, including those written by Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, definitely altered it.
The meta-narrative is what people react to in the process of making culture. It is often added to, and very rarely subtracted from. When something is subtracted, it is often subtracted violently and dramatically, and realignments of the meta-narrative often produced widespread strife, but can lead to a flourishing of culture afterward. Consider the European Wars of Religion and the Enlightenment as an example of this.
It is widely agreed upon in the academy that the Enlightenment project brought about the horrors of the Early 20th century: World War I came as much from the existence of the Nation State (which grew out of the Peace of Westphalia) and faith in reason as it did from the barrel of Gavrilo Princip’s gun, and the atrocities of fascism weren’t in spite of Enlightenment reason but because of it, as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out when they said that, "It is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters but more than anything else vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
After the end of World War II, and the emergence of conflict between Marxism-Leninism and Capitalism, which could have burned the whole world clean, the postmodernists began to question the legitimacy of meta-narratives. The overarching stories we tell ourselves about the world were supposedly cast down.
Of course, we’ve simply replaced reason with irony — which is why you can buy a t-shirt with warnings about this on them (also, short shorts, which I could find images of, but not a store page for; the above is available here.)
What I’m arguing is that they weren’t: the page may be unmarked, but the impression of other things, once written, is present there. The unmarked default is sadly legible there, and it will remain as such until we agree to interrogate the meta-narratives that are present, instead of simply believing them to be broken and absent.
※
If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting both us and a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.)