Offending the Audience
“Since you are probably thoroughly offended already, we will waste no time before thoroughly offending you, you chuckleheads.”
Peter Handke, Offending the Audience (1966)
In politics, people give and take offense. It has always been thus. And yet an air of bad faith has lately descended upon this social drama. People who take offense are accused of merely faking it, while people who give it are accused of playing dumb about that fact. This happens whenever a social drama grows too familiar. Each group suspects the other of playing a stale script by rote—and onlookers are left confused and disenchanted. Who, they ask, if anyone, is being sincere?
People say that America is now enduring an “epistemic crisis” brought about by a “post-fact society.” But you might also say that we’re experiencing a moral crisis brought about by a post-offense society. If the taking of offense is no longer taken seriously, then how are we to know when a line has been crossed?
Seeking to take full advantage of this crisis, alt-right activists have been trying to turn the drama of offense—once a powerful source of norms—into a worn-out, ridiculous spectacle. The point is not to convert people from one side to the other (from offended to offender) but to grow the ranks of the vast, confused middle. To that end, they’ve played the same game repeatedly for years. Inspired by the work of theater scholar Shannon Steen, I call this game the “Dog-Whistling of Everyday Life.”
Here’s how it works: linking hateful, extremist ideas to everyday images, gestures, and objects, alt-right trolls hope to bait left-wing politicians into condemning things that are otherwise totally unobjectionable. For example, through a concerted social media campaign, these trolls managed to link a cartoon stoner dude (Pepe the Frog) to “white power” ideology. When Hillary Clinton’s campaign posted an explainer describing Pepe as a “symbol associated with white supremacy,” alt-right trolls declared victory. They then applied the same tactic to common gestures (like the hand-sign for “okay”) and everyday actions (like drinking milk). Attaching monstrous ideas to silly things, the trolls have made it harder to distinguish between normal, waking life and an outrageous, fascistic nightmare. And I suppose that’s the point.
Responding to tactics like these requires a clear-eyed view of the roles they script for us—as well as a clear-headed choice about how to play these roles, or whether to play them at all.
In recent years, people have spent a lot of time worrying about the “normalization” of various behaviors and ideas. Well, maybe this is what normalization feels like: never knowing whether or not a glass of milk signifies white supremacy, never knowing whether or not a White House aide is flashing a neo-Nazi sign on national TV. She might be trolling you, she might be signaling true solidarity with neo-Nazis—or it might all be a big misunderstanding. Curtain up on a post-offense society!
Responding to tactics like these requires a clear-eyed view of the roles they script for us—as well as a clear-headed choice about how to play these roles, or whether to play them at all. Consider what happened in 2017 when the alt-right propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos tried to speak on the UC-Berkeley campus. People protested, violence broke out, and the event was cancelled. Mission accomplished? I guess. But I’ve often wondered what would have happened if—instead of expressing their outrage, which of course they had every right to express—protestors had arranged a mass display of bored, semi-indifferent scorn for Milo’s antics.
Imagine an auditorium full of students wearing noise-cancelling headphones, typing their term papers and annotating their textbooks as Milo rants and raves. If he tries to confront them, he will seem like what he is: a fringe figure desperate for an audience who even cares what he thinks. And if he doesn’t, then precious few people will have heard him speak. Meanwhile, the work of education (which he was trying to disrupt) goes on. That’s called flipping the script!
If you want to learn how scripts like these ones operate, you could do worse than to study the theater—especially avant-garde theater, which regularly flips the script and breaks the conventions. If, specifically, you want to learn about the drama of giving and taking offense, then it just so happens that an expert on that subject is making headlines right now: avant-garde playwright, deeply offensive man, and 2019 Nobel laureate Peter Handke.
Early in his career, Handke offended the public slyly, with a wink—just the way some of us like to be offended. Later, he took up a sincerely offensive cause: defending the Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic by denying the basic facts of the Hague’s case against him. (Handke questioned, for instance, that over 8,000 Bosnians were slaughtered in Srebenica in July 1995. Post-offense figures tend to dabble in post-fact thinking, too.) These two kinds of offense—one, a pleasurable transgression against norms; the other, a cruel rejection of shared reality—are so different from one another, it’s a wonder we use the same word to describe them in the first place.
Handke’s career started off with a bang. When he was only 23, he was invited to Princeton University to speak at a major conference on German literature. There, he addressed most of Germany’s leading writers and, to their faces, called their writing inane. You can imagine the shock his speech caused. Two months later, in June 1966, he was back in Frankfurt, Germany for the premiere of his play Offending the Audience. It began with actors striding downstage muttering invective: “You chuckle-heads, you small-timers, you nervous nellies, you fuddy-duddies, you windbags, you sitting ducks, you milquetoasts.”
If they didn’t exist, we would have to invent them . . . Because the drama of giving offense is, crucially, the experience of imagining the offendedness of others.
Both events have gone down in history as revolutionary acts—but were they? When Offending the Audience was revived in recent years, critical opinion was unanimous: ho-hum. “To put it bluntly: Offending the Audience … doesn’t,” wrote one critic. “As much as I tried to get into the far-out spirit, these cuties just couldn’t offend me,” wrote another. Both critics chalk this failure up to the great march of history. This play “undoubtedly did inspire shock and awe in 1966,” says one critic, but not today. Instead, it is just “a museum piece,” says another critic, no longer working as well as it did on “any square from the 1960s.”
But there’s just one problem with this historical narrative: it’s false. As Sabine Gross observes in her entry on the play in the Encyclopedia of German Literature, “at the premiere, only a few audience members left, there were a couple of brief and polite interruptions, and at the end the audience applauded wildly.” On the second night, audiences went further, gleefully getting involved. Some may have been “mildly scandalized,” but most were “inclined to enjoy being offended.” Similarly, if you listen to recordings of Handke’s Princeton harangue, you’ll hear more laughter than gasping—and you’ll also hear people shouting down the man who tries to stop Handke mid-tirade.
The truth is, in that Princeton speech as in his famous play, Handke invites his audience to enjoy being offended—or rather, to enjoy not being offended at all, actually. That’s what makes those reviews of the 2008 production of Offending the Audience so unintentionally funny: each critic is having exactly the feeling that Handke’s play was meant to evoke, and yet somehow they think they’re having this feeling at the play’s expense! This absurd situation is only possible because these critics instinctively believe that someone else, somewhere else was gravely offended by this play. Any square from the 1960s…
This emotional dynamic is one that Donald Trump, like Handke, has learned to weaponize. Since the earliest days of his campaign, people have compared the U.S. president’s frequent rallies to the button-pushing act of an insult comic. He mocks people, imitates them, and calls them nasty names. But unlike an insult comic—he doesn’t aim this mockery at people in the room, or even at people who exist. Instead, he invokes absent people (“Some people say…,” his comments often begin) or even creates them out of whole cloth, tailor-made to be mocked!
Trump may take it extremes, but this tactic is typical: the drama of giving offense has always been founded on a fiction. The offended party may exist, but in the moment of performance—during a Trump rally, or at a performance of Handke’s play—the literal existence of this offended person is immaterial. If they didn’t exist, we would have to invent them—just like the 2008 critics of Handke’s play did, inventing the squares of sixties-era Frankfurt. Because the drama of giving offense is, crucially, the experience of imagining the offendedness of others.
Cable news pundits and political scientists talk all the time about “political polarization” in America. Whatever polarization is, this is how polarization feels: you gleefully conjure a person, imagined or real, whose reaction is not only different from your own, but in fact ridiculous. Polarization can also feel ugly and strong—as it does in Handke’s refusal to acknowledge a proven genocide—but the drama of giving offense helps us hide any ugliness, even from ourselves. After all, we feel light, we feel happy—we’re having a good time. If others aren’t, that’s their problem! And presto change-o, our cruelties turn into transgressions!
The performing arts teach us how to achieve such magic tricks—but also how to see through such tricks and invent their replacements. The task is always the same: to find new modes of social presence and persuasion in performance. You might find them in an avant-garde play or in the low-brow act of an insult comic. But remember: the solution needn’t be anything gaudy. Sometimes presence alone—headphones on, doing your homework—is enough to flip the script, to recapture the people’s imagination.
