Oleana, play by David Mamet, directed by Harold Pinter Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2 Reviewed by S Doyle TWO CHAIRS face each other across a desk. On the higher one sits a middle-aged American academic, on the other a student who timidly enquires after her grades.
Her lack of understanding of the subject and his inability to enlighten her eventually reduces her to tears of frustration. He places his arm around her for comfort.
In the following act the student returns with charges of sexual harassment based on the physical contact. Elitism, sexism, classism, promoting pornography, and - eventually - rape, are added to the accusations. As a result the professor loses his job.
The play has had an enormous impact in America. It addresses 'Political Correctness' (PC) head-on.
PC's voice in the play the student 'Carol', depicted as a ferocious pitiless adolescent intent on wrecking the life of a well-intentioned - if slightly inept and insensitive - liberal academic.
In pursuit of her dogma she undermines not only his position, but symbolises PC'S frightening threat to intellectual openness. When in the final scene the acamdemic physically assaults her the audience has nothing but sympathy. In New York they even stood up and cheered.
Mamet's all-out attack on PC is misplaced. The problem with PC is not its dangerous extremism but its lack of radicalism. By focusing attention on language it substitutes individual change for a change in society.
More than an 'error, it is a basic flaw at the heart of liberal individualistic politics: 'if only enough people thought differently then things would change'. Persuasion becomes strategy.
The problem lies in its ignorance of the fundamental divisions of class that determine access to the means of persuasion. Such a strategy can't work - and never has.
Unable to achieve any significant return using persuasion, a campaign of legislative coercion becomes the course of action for the advocates of PC - struggle and solidarity are written out of a politics based on individual behaviour. This is the turn PC has taken in the USA.
Mamet's counter-position of 'freedom of speech' to PC should be debunked for the same reason. His is a defence of a cosy middle-class freedom' of the academic establishment to churn out self-promoting mediocrity unfettered by any sanction.
Any threat to intellectual endeavour comes today not from women's groups or 'extremists', but from governments increasingly determined to fashion a workforce of uncritical, docile, compliant consumers and producers.
This tirade against PC remains as much trapped in individualistic politics as are its supporters. Mamet's freedom is one of individuals to say what they please. Socialists in the West know only too well how limited this freedom can be.
Without proper access to the media it is a more convenient means of propaganda for the powerful than a way of conveying alternative viewpoints. Access is the key matter here: who owns and controls what.
This limits and determines what is said, when and to whom. Similarly it is not rightthinking individuals free to express themselves who have the ability to change the statusquo, but social forces: collectivities built out of shared interests, classes. Mamet's antipathy for 'groups' shows how far he is from this understanding.
Oleanna joins the nascent anti-PC backlash in Britain before the PC campaign has really got off the ground. Perhaps a debate is due nevertheless.
Just what do we expect to achieve by changes in our language? Language reflects relations of power and domination - so we need to be aware of the prejudices that accompany words, and try to avoid them. But getting rid of oppression and exploitation will take more than a change of words. US-style PC is more a diversion from this task than a threat to freedom'.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 56, February 5 1994, Page 10 not just in London but