Between Pandering and Self-Pity: Thinking About Political Communication
Most people who have taught students at any level will be familiar with the experience of dealing with challenging or difficult texts. Especially when it comes to things like philosophy, students will naturally (and understandably) complain about language that seems pointlessly complex or unclear, that seems to take a hundred years and a thousand syllables to make a point that could made more quickly and effectively in a couple of brisk sentences.
It’s a perfectly reasonable response, especially when so many humanities scholars seem not to prize clarity very highly. You only need to look at the many news articles that do the rounds each year about awful academic prose to realise the risks such writing can pose to the messages that these individuals are trying to promote. Not only does it undermine the specific content of the piece, it discredits the entire practice of scholarship. Most famously, of course, there’s the Sokal hoax — in 1996 a physics professor, Alan Sokal, managed to get a several-thousand-word article of absolute nonsense published in an American academic journal that published on postmodern theory. The editors apparently failed to spot the difference between technical precision and utter garbage. But there are many more examples to be found. It seems commonsensical to many outside the academy that there are people in it who are spinning out their well-paid careers generating pages and pages of verbal compost — so why should we be obliged to read them?
There is a response to this. Often, the reason people are writing in a difficult manner is because they want to get the reader to think twice about a subject they think they already know well. The act of presenting a message in difficult language, or in a convoluted way, can oblige a reader to slow down and respond to the intended meaning of the words as if they were approaching the concept anew. Call a thing by a name you’ve been using for years, and there’s a chance you won’t even think twice; describe it in an unusual or difficult way and maybe you’ll look again. Maybe you’ll see it differently as a result. This notion, of defamiliarisation, can take many forms but is central to a huge amount of difficult twentieth-century writing, poetry and critical theory. I think it has a lot going for it, but when you’re in the middle of some mind-bendingly weird and difficult French obscurantism, it’s still a pain in the rear end.
Moreover, built into this strategy is the hope, even the expectation, that the reader will do the work necessary to fully engage with the text as intended. It is an approach to writing that’s the very opposite of the lemon-sorbet New Yorker prose style, a way of writing that’s designed almost to be invisible as it slips down the mental gullet. And while giving tough prose the effort it requires can reap dividends, it can also discourage a whole pile of others who never get to the end or ever really feel they understand the messages being imparted. Defeated readers walk away feeling excluded or, worse, stupid. Those who do conquer the text — and often it does come to resemble a kind of struggle for conquest — assume a sense of intellectual superiority, a belief that their ability to cope with the demands of the mental assault course marks them out from others. Their triumph is not rewarded with a greater understanding of and connection to the world, but by becoming a member of a particular, self-regarding elite, distanced from everyone else by their certainty of being smarter than the average reader.
In short, the strategy of defamiliarisation, while a crucial tool for questioning things that appear straightforward, comes with risks: the risk of losing many of the people that you’re trying to bring along with you, and the risk of separating you off into a self-styled elective group who believe you are, unlike others, uniquely able to see the reality behind the Matrix.
Because this approach to communication is concerned with looking twice at the way things are in life and trying to think differently about how they could be, it is a strategy that has been more appealing to people on the political left than on the right, and it is the left that most fully bears the risks that are attendant upon it. If you are encouraged to think about communication in these terms, you can start to fall into the kind of belief that it’s the responsibility of other people to understand where you’re coming from rather than your responsibility to persuade them. If other people don’t get what you’re saying, it must be their fault.
I can’t help but think that the increasingly insistent demands that we contextualise the political choices taken by the British left, that others are obliged to work to understand the environment that Corbyn and his allies are operating in, that outsiders must recognise and acknowledge the ways in which his poor performance is conditioned by a hostile press , by a PLP that won’t go along with him, the perpetual refrain that he’s not been given a fair shot, is all a reflection of this same underlying orientation — the belief and approach that suggests that others need to do the work to “get” what’s really going on among the community of critical radicals, rather than that the radicals need to do the work to persuade people to come along with them. Go too far down this road and you end up with a politics dominated by self-justification and self-pity, blaming everyone else for being too dumb, too immoral, or too trapped within a media-driven false consciousness to recognise the truth that only you and your allies can see.
If the danger of this attitude is insularity, the threat posed by the opposite approach — focusing entirely on talking to people in the language they understand and are comfortable and familiar with — is pandering. If you believe that your only purpose in political debate is to tell people what they already think, to speak in terms they already understand and accept, then you end up seeming unprincipled — or, worse still, pointless. And that’s certainly something that could be levelled against some members of the moderate wing of the Labour Party: to eager to say whatever’s necessary to get votes, whether they believe it or not.
The art of politics lies in navigating between these two poles: standing for something, speaking up for your beliefs, but not speaking only to only the small group who are willing to work to see the world in exactly the same way as you do and not expecting everyone else to go on a long march simply because you fancy taking a trip. Between naval-gazing and pandering lies an alternative approach to political communication: one that defines democracy in terms that respect other citizens as people of equal potential and equal capacity for reason, but without confusing that respect with the assumption that the mass of people are always right. A belief that people are open to and capable of persuasion, but that it’s the advocate’s job to persuade. Not hector, persuade. Democratic politics at its best is about using the language we share to build new alliances, not parroting things that voters already think, or speaking in ways that shut them out and telling yourself you were never given a proper chance. But there’s no doubt that it’s a bloody difficult thing to get right.
