Bah Humbug: On magic words, materialism, and narrative
Humbug (hɒ mbɒɡ), sb. (a.) colloq. 1751. [Of unkn. origin ; its vogue is commented upon in The Student, 1751 (‘Of the Superlative Advantages arising from the use of the new-invented Science, called the Humbug’).] 1. A hoax ; an imposition - 1799. 2. An imposture, fraud, sham 1751 3. Deception, pretence; used interjectionally = ‘stuff and nonsense!’ 1825. 4. An imposter, a ‘fraud’ 1804. 5. A kind of sweetmeat (dial.) 1825. 6. attrib. Humbugging 1812.
- The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
(Oxford: OUP, 1973)Barack Obama was the very last “horoscope candidate” — a politician who manages to speak so vaguely that his platform could mean anything to anyone. It’s not going to work this time around.
- Amber A’Lee Frost, It’s Bernie, Bitch
The Baffler, republished Jacobin, 22.01.2019For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.- W.H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats
Collected Poems, (London: Faber & Faber, 1994)
You don’t have to go far to find unedifying spectacle in contemporary politics. Hope is thin on the ground. Then again, the politics of ‘hope and change’ from a decade ago feel not just emptied out of meaning, but like the rotten appetiser for the trashcan from which we are currently eating in Trump’s America and Johnson’s Britain.
Last Wednesday, the British House of Commons was as unedifying as it has ever been, and a bitter argument about the uses and abuses of language has rattled on unceremoniously since. Back from a prorogation which the UK Supreme Court had just ruled unlawful, the hapless Prime Minister was in vituperative mood which, one assumes, was calibrated to read as defiance. He was every bit the crass, vulgarian public schoolboy of his self-made character, and peppered his rambling, ranting speech with a litany of accusations of his opponents: they were ‘frit’ in the strange archaism reserved exclusively for electoral sabre-rattling, also ‘chicken’, ‘turkeys’, ‘traitors’, ‘collaborators’, and the so-called ‘Benn Act’ recently passed as part of the run of seven straight parliamentary defeats for Johnson, a ‘surrender bill’. It was sick-making to listen in on, I found it genuinely and surprisingly scary.
Predictably and with some justification, mostly female and mostly Labour MPs, who take the brunt of the online and in person abuse of this toxic period of politics, took the opportunity to implore Johnson to remember Jo Cox, the MP murdered by a far-right extremist during the referendum campaign, and moderate his language. Johnson’s response, was “I have to say, Mr Speaker, I’ve never heard such humbug in all my life”. It was a shocking moment, which at best one might describe as deeply ill-mannered. But what to make of the claim that it was language like this which ‘killed Jo Cox’?
At a minimum, we must notice a strange linguistic double-standard at work. One of the strongest complainants against incivility in parliament is Jess Phillips, who first came to national prominence proudly declaring to Owen Jones that she’d “knife [Corbyn] in the front.” The prorogation - wrong though it was - was widely - and hyperbolically - described as a coup, with Johnson compared to a dictator. Fascist has become an insult so widespread it has no analytical value - a trajectory that George Orwell complained of decades ago. Similarly, ‘death threat’ has become a much wider category than a credible threat to kill someone (many of the examples are shocking, deeply distasteful and distressing, but implying they are threats-to-kill robs the phrase of meaning, and pretends neither metaphor-making, nor the implications of subjects, verbs, and objects are significant). Doubtless, beyond the headlines, real targeted threats are sent and received. The threat to stab Corbyn is much more direct than any example of violent language quoted by Phillips, though no-one doubted it was anything other than idiomatic play with the tired political and interpersonal metaphor of stabbing someone in the back. That infamous Phillips-Jones interview was prior to the Brexit referendum and Cox’s tragic murder, and in fairness to Phillips it’s unlikely she’d use that formulation today. The same day that she raised the urgent parliamentary question linked above about the effect of language, on the one hand, she was criticised for a disputed meltdown in the lobbies, and a man was arrested, and later charged, for attempting to kick in the doors of her constituency offices. With Johnsonian brass-neck, in the days since, Phillips has returned to her core project of flogging her book and claimed “we’ve fallen down a rabbit-hole of nitpicking over language”. The discourse of ‘both sides’ has ignominious recent echoes, but a close narrative reading does not leave room for linguistic sanctimony, or idealist claims about wrong-action being shaped by wrong-thinking, dictated by either clumsy or calculated bad language. For a solidly material analysis of terrorism, from Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker, which is more than capable of accounting for the pathetic assassin of Jo Cox, the incomparable What’s Left? podcast is useful and incisive, as ever. Paying attention to the linguistic vicissitudes hurled at each other by competing wings of neo-liberalism is worth doing, but not because a more perfectly performative language will emerge with which our hoped-for strange new worlds can emerge. Rather, it can be a way of seeing our fictions more clearly, and building the basis for real action.
Our approach to narrative is not about giving the One True Reading of the idealist Rorschach of our politics: whether we see ‘robust debate’, ‘inflammatory language’, ‘rudeness’, ‘calling out’, or ‘literal violence’ depends on the ideology we bring to bear, and the discursive framework that underpins it. Distressingly, the same was true of ‘hope and change’- indeed, in its current incarnation, neoliberalism red in tooth and claw, builds upon (neo)Liberal foundations from Obama, Blair, Clinton and others.
“I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology.”
Brexit itself, operates at the level of language like the rest of these political Rorschachs: everyone thinks it signifies precisely - and only - what they care about - and we’re not immune from this. And a narrative approach can appear to add to the hall of mirrors, creating an infinite regression in which discourse piles upon discourse endlessly, making any basis for action impossible.
Our project - as narrative optimists - involves deploying narrative approaches towards materialist ends. Stepping back from linguistic squabbles, as materialists, we’re skeptical of the claim that, in Terese’s usefully ironic formulation, “magic words” create bad action, and yet as students of narrative, we hold, with Iara Lessa that,
Discourses are systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects of the worlds of which they speak.
- Iara Lessa, Discursive Struggles Within Social Welfare
British Journal of Social Work (2006) 36, 284
But we also hold that the quality of ‘the discourse’ in Westminster has little impact on the material conditions of the working class, and that this, like any discourse, is just a story. Johnson knows this too, and will run his opponents ragged, fighting these fripperies while he ploughs on defending the interests of capital. Whether it’s a deliberate scheme on his part, or the long-held habits of power, tempting his opponents into an aesthetic fight about etiquette is effective, and operates as an absorbing anti-politics, while power continues to operate, unchallenged. With grim irony, given the much vaunted concern for the supposed causes of the killing of Jo Cox, this strategy leaves the misery and alienation that Brexit represents and deploys - including its violent and discursive excesses - entirely intact. Retreating to storied explanations and discourse policing doesn’t protect us from further violence, it leaves its causes untroubled while our attention is elsewhere.
At the risk of playing the literalists at their own game, from here it is plain that language didn’t kill Jo Cox, any more than good language will summon the revolution we so sorely need, if only we formulate the magic words correctly. Calling concerns about death threats ‘humbug’ is aesthetically and interpersonally gross, but it’s not a political hinge upon which anything turns (indeed, it beautifully illustrates why we should doubt and mistrust storytelling, operating as it did with a linguistic sleight-of-hand, calculated both to injure feelings and send the audience in the discursive direction of Ebenezer Scrooge while making, quite precisely, nothing happen at the level of the exercise of power). In engaging in language-policing and championing civility, liberalism appears to undertake a narrative analysis, but imagines that in modifying a symptom, it need not address a cause. In turn, this leaves ideology unchanged, only stated more politely - and so acceptably, and therefore more robustly. We are still eating from the trashcan. In the formula which Nancy Mairs used for a discussion of the language of disability, mistaking civility for a step out of ideology,
…partakes of the same semantic hopefulness that transformed countries from "undeveloped" to "underdeveloped," then to "less developed," and finally to "developing" nations. People have continued to starve in those countries during the shift. Some realities do not obey the dictates of language.
- Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple
Carnal Acts (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994)
We’re living in the long shadow of the troubling collapse of consciously material politics that has been the project of neoliberalism. The claim that “the personal is political” typified this ideological turn, and attempts to reduce politics to interpersonal dispute, just as it raises interpersonal dispute to the level of politics. It’s a formula to neuter radical politics of any potential power.
Students of narrative need not be so guileless: in observing the linguistic games at play, we need be fooled by neither the ‘semantic hopefulness’ of the Obama-Blair revival acts of the idealist upper echelons of the Democratic or Labour parties, nor the all-to-similarly idealistic bluster of Humbug Johnson.
Our narrative approach is not content with ever-more-elaborate ‘dictates of language’ to which reality will not bend: we do not wish to perfect ideology, but to see it at work, and step outside of it - the claim was never that only bad poetry made nothing happen. Narrative optimism is deconstruction as disillusionment. This is a necessary inversion and negation of not just a specifically distasteful idealist project, such as a Tory hard Brexit, but idealism itself, whether ‘believing in Britain’, ‘returning dignity to the White House’, being ‘Better Together’ or ‘taking back control’.
Attending to narrative as an end in itself makes nothing happen, and accommodates us to ourselves as we guzzle garbage from the trashcan.
Or we can embrace disillusionment - why would we not want to be disabused of our illusions? - stop seeking the correct formulation of magical words, squabbling about language and start to confront the material reality of power. Narrative idealism can superficially resemble the operation of narrative radicalism, but Mark Fisher spelt out the distinction when he wrote:
Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.
- Mark Fisher
Capitalist Realism, (London: Zero Books, 2009:17)
Discourse policing is humbug, but so is the idealism deployed by the humbuggers currently squatting in Downing Street. Poetry - especially the adolescent poetry of our current political discourse - makes nothing happen, (and, as Auden knew, that was never the point of real poetry, which is not politics). Power remains power.
It’s time to choose: grow all the way up, or continue to gorge ourselves on the garbage in the trashcan. While we still have nothing to lose but our chains, in Zizek’s words, freedom hurts.
