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Portrait via Post-modernity
It is one of those ‘art works’ - the kind that works by juxtaposition of objects, to create an exhibition of matters out of context: A urinal as fountain or tin opener as art. The element from one world, or one past is placed into another - and resonates as a challenge or an intervention. And yet in the case of this artwork, what is used is something taken from another country or time. The past or geography create the distance, the issue for the artwork to embody. And the artwork is not something marooned in a gallery, so much as an entire approach to making laws and fighting political campaigns. In such an exhibition there are two rather distinct axes for repetition. Things are repeated via precedent and via prejudice. These axes are not mutually exclusive – most issues, most campaigns involve both. But rather they represent different approaches to the repetition, different takes on what it means to repeat, and who is repeating (and when and why). These axes are then themselves arranged in a scale, ranging from shallow to deep, as the influence of the repetition and its power varies and diffuses.
The all-important north-south line in these scales, charts out the effect that precedent has on political campaigns and their manifestos. At the deep end of this scale is a question. Where exactly can one get legislation from? Making it from scratch is time-consuming and very difficult. Opposition tends to lack the know-how to do it, and government the time. There exists however a near-infinite resource of feasible-sounding policies in the laws of other states and countries. These laws can then be pilfered at will. Moreover this move has of course the added advantage that the laws borrowed are ones that appear to work elsewhere. We are presented then with constellations of apparently fully worked out and tested laws, laws which ‘we’ know will work (or at least have in the one context). What is more we have the additional virtue of then being able to draft these laws anew. We then will not only get to borrow legislation from elsewhere, we also get to improve it. How, the appeal goes, could things go wrong?
And yet of course it is seldom really this simple. The wholescale borrowing of laws and precedents is at best problematic (as every post-modern artist knows - for their entire art hinges on this problem), and at worst idiotic. Any one law works not as a little bit of information, or a tin opener that can be lifted, but rather as a gear in a complex interwoven system. Gears from one system do not translate necessarily easily into other systems; or if they do, then there will be different effects and consequences. One might hope that the systems which one has borrowed the legislation from are near enough to make no difference, and yet any difference, however small, might matter.
The result then of borrowing laws is a strange one. The laws do not simply work or not, so much as warp the system, making it simply function differently. Borrowing human rights legislation or rules about open government from Europe has weird effects in Britain. Lacking Scandinavian humour and perspective, we have a marked litigious tendency to insist that our rights are comprised of the most trivial of occurrences (the right to wear symbols etc.). Or again, the right to find out what our MPs give themselves has shaken a political system that was based on a nudge wink secrecy. That is everyone knew about the perks scheme for MP’s and that it has existed since the late seventies (and was set up in its current form by Thatcher). It was the way that government bribed its MP’s without upping their salary. It was then a fairly open secret and somehow represented a hypocrisy at the heart of the British system. We do not like the idea that we ought really to pay MPs at least as we pay doctors and senior civil servants. The effect then of the Freedom of Information legislation was to blast all this secrecy aside, and with it this convenient hypocrisy. The result is that MPs are now in an even more weird position. They are not paid enough for what they do, and but are universally despised for being over-rewarded and greedy. In short if you transpose legislation for open government into a society where secrecy for a long time has been an additional currency, then all kinds of hell breaks loose in the resulting devaluing.
The deep end of the scale is then composed of this desire to borrow laws from other places or pasts, and revolutionise (or use the language of change at least) society. At the shallower end of the scale are the cheap political moves, and cod stories that campaigning parties use and misuse. At the moment there is of course an old story being rehearsed. The story of the ‘Winter of Discontent’. Has Brown, we are asked, lost control? Are the current strikes (by transport workers) the sign of weakness? the Tories ask. No matter that this question is puerile and stupid. No matter then that it infers a level of cretinous stupidity on the behalf of the unions. As surely they would realize that by striking days before a general election (and planning a strike for the very day the campaign was to start) that they were in effect making it very likely that the Tories would win the election. The dispute is then not in response to Brown’s perceived weakness so much as marking territory prior to a Conservative government (or hung parliament) - that is, if it is anything. But none of this matters. All that matters is that beyond rhyme and reason one could claim that the ‘bad old days’ of union powers (there were less strikes in the 1970’s than in the 1990’s but who is counting) are back. The Tories then immediately claim that they too are back as our deliverers, as, in the old very hackneyed stories of a generation ago, a political campaign is fought out.
The precedent of history, then is used to populate our minds with old tales. We are invited to pour our hopes and our dreams into these tales, to make them live anew – to the benefit or otherwise of one political party. In making such a move Cameron, rather interestingly moves backwards down the scale. A year ago or so, the Labour Party ran a very ineffective campaign attempting to brand Cameron as a ‘toff’. It did not work as it was beyond the shallow end of the precedent scale. And yet in attacking strikes, in the appeal to the politics of thirty years ago, Cameron is revealing himself every inch the class warrior (as Thatcher was). With of course this critical difference. She at least came from a relatively poor background and there was a degree to which she knew what she was attacking. Conversely, Cameron’s is merely the blind prejudice against the poor, or to be fair the lack of comprehension of the poor that the very rich have. He attacks from a position of ignorance/incomprehension. The result is that he is ‘further along’ the scale. That is he is threatening even as he looks like ‘winning’ the campaign, to become a deeper avatar of our history. The avatar of the pitiless struggles and somewhat pyrrhic victories of yesteryear. A political generation that destroyed union power by destroying manufacturing industry and so placing us in the hands of the money men and at the whims of global finance.
The scale by precedent, has at its heart this idea of finding in the other something of value for the present. The other scale, that of prejudice works because individuals have at one time or other, felt themselves at a lost in that present. A debate moves on, develops, and yet an individual remains the same. They are then forever shouting or screaming ‘and another thing’, or attempting to warp that argument according to their frustrated desire. At the deepest end of this scale is the current (right wing inspired all too often) rejection of the science of climate change. At the heart of this rejection is a realizing that the politics of the science of climate change (that is the way that we enact the policies needed) does not fit very easily into the standard free market model. Carbon trading has by and large not been a success. Not only in itself but also from the free market perspective, where it imposes a limit upon what can be done; i.e., a limit on innovation as much as mass production, a limit that then the devotees of Thatcherism and their ilk are likely to reject out of hand. The result is then, we have figures from our political past, such as Nigel Lawson attacking climate change. This attack is all the more queer because it will work against the practice of science even while donning its clothes. That is, it will take scientific affects and attempt to enhouse them within an existing suspicion of the ethics of climate change (which are complicated). It will then attempt to use science itself to directly critique those ethics. It will attempt to show them as actually doctrinal, inflexible, and morally suspect (as they seek to curtail individual freedoms). Knowledge is then turned into a political and moral critique. This is an old story. The stupidity here is that it ignores the real power of the climate change argument, a power that saw very many sceptical scientists who had rejected the science initially, be won over. Oh of course one needs always to be careful (and to be aware that at any one time one is wrong often enough), but that does not mean that one ought simply to reject all the science out of hand because of an existing prejudice. Given the scope of the threat (even if that power is expressed as a sequence of probabilities), it is simply better to act now (when something can be done) to mitigate it, then leave it till later when we will of course know how bad it is or not.
The sceptic argument, the furnishing of science to support a deeply held conviction about the power of the human market, would have no value. It would be little more than one position within the slow inhabitancy of a science that is insisting we treat global climate as a highly complex fractured system. As that system is so subtle and complex, the rather crude world of the free market cannot comprehend it or easily allow for it (which is why they of course reject the move in the first place, just as they rejected the political versions of the same move, that is the desire to create compassionate markets). What gives it a power is of course the fact that this intransigence reflects the minds of the agnostic majority. Most people do not really understand the science (why should they?). They merely know that their lives always appear under threat by meta-tales of disaster, and that climate change appears merely as yet another one of these fictions. So that while they accept that doing something (quite small) is probably worthwhile, they are rather unwilling to actually make sacrifices and deep cuts or changes to their lifestyle. The inertia, the defiant prejudice of the anti-climate change lobby finds then its echo in the wider population, and so becomes a political force (and does so in spite of the crudity of its claims).
At the shallower end of this scale lies surely the current attitudes of the Republican Party. Here is a party so traumatized by being comprehensively beaten in a general election that they have decided en mass to pretend that the campaign is not over. They therefore run the day to day politics of actually governing the country as if they were still in the black and white mass appeal rallies of an election. They are not then interested in compromise or sensible discussion, they merely reject and mobilize the voice of that rejection. The result is of course that they can (with their right wing media support) orchestrate very effective campaigns against legislation. And yet of course this campaigning is a risk. If the legislation goes wrong then they will gain massive political capital; and yet if is alright or even just OK, then they will lose, possibly big time.
The trouble then with the perpetual-campaign approach is that one not only loses sight of what is happening and how one might have influenced it (that is how one might have affected or not a bit of legislation); but also one will lose sight of everyone else save one’s natural supporters. One will become naturally surrounded by one’s party workers and their opinions will appear the norm (one simply cannot then hear the voices of those who actually needed the healthcare reform scheme, and one must brand them in their poverty un-American). One then is no longer in the actual world of the day to day. This might work - one might be able to so stigmatize a piece of legislation by running a perpetual campaign against it, that one renders it inoperable. And the risk is then big. At any time, it might be revealed merely as a shallow campaign by people who have not really understood that they lost an election, and cannot come to terms with that fact (or learn anything from it). A move which if it did happen would of course be a disaster.
The first of these axes then defines a way in which elements from other times and other places are frogmarched into now. That is how and when they become political realities, defining politics and beyond that the laws of today. The second axis defines how individuals respond to change and accept or reject it. Between the two, there runs the same basic current, the current that insists that the terrors of today must be dressed up in the myths and language of the past. A move that then makes modern politics merely the mumming of old long dead history. A move that will surely continue until we and the very stones cry out, with Marx ‘let the dead bury their own dead, let us sing a new song, and make a new set of myths of our own’. But who will heed us?
