A Glossary of Terms for a Tory History Textbook; or, how to teach freshers historiographical semiology

With the new term starting soon, my university campus is undergoing its annual replenishment with fresh-faced first-years (albeit fewer of them this year, for some reason) filled with kittenish excitement, scampering about their wondrous new world with their over-sized eyes and enormous ears. And some of them are historians. But most of those won’t previously have studied history as they will in university, and some of them won’t like the new way of approaching the subject as a subject, as opposed to the subject as a succession of events.  And they will, at least initially, express their alienation with various degrees of mewing and pooing.* (*Just seeing how far I can push this kitten metaphor.  And also I’ve just got a kitten.)

But history isn’t just a succession of events.  It’s many other things too, among which it’s an academic discipline.  That is, it’s a subject made by objects, namely historians.  Contrary to the appearance of some of us, historians are humans.  As humans we carry all kinds of memes, including consciously-held ideological principles (such as a belief in the Dawkinsian memetics), and, more trickily because they’re more likely to be held unconsciously, deeper ideational assumptions that undergird those ideological principles (such as a belief in the modern, western, scientific methods of enquiry that helped Richard Dawkins theorize the existence of memes).  Moreover, our ideological principles and ideational assumptions are reflected in the very words we use when crafting our reflections on our subject, again both consciously and unconsciously.  So it is that the articles and books historians write might well be well-meant attempts to reconstruct history as a subject, but they are also the productions of imperfect objects wittingly and unwittingly spunking their own intellectual DNA all over their work.  And to say this is not to spout some post-modern hocus pocus.  Some post-modernists may claim to have discovered subjectivity in historical writing, just as some 1960s hippies claimed they discovered sex, but it was the very pre-post-modern E. H. Carr who rightly reminded us that to study history you also have to study the historian.   

Put it all like that to the average fresher, however, and you are likely to be confronted by wide-eyed incredulity, first at the unfamiliar academic jargon, and, second, at the use of the word spunking.  So you have to break the neophytes in gently. In an attempt to do so, we have a freshers’ course here at Swansea called Making History.  Yes, “making” history.  That is, it’s about how we produce and present history (and by “we” I don't just mean academic historians in the traditonal sense but also librarians, TV producers, film makers, and anyone else who creates representations of the past).  And one of the things we try to introduce new students to on this course, to employ more technical terms than spunking, is the semiology of historical writing, the semiotics of individual historians, and indeed the subtextual subjectivities inherent in history as historiography.

To that effect, early in the course we make the students read a not-so-subtle article from the Daily Express that purports to reveal left-wing bias and consequent “dumbing-down”* in the teaching of history in today’s politically-correct Britain. (*“Dumbing down” is an almost unfathomably complex historical phenomenon that only its most sophisticated theorists are capable of understanding.  It is in no way a concept of such vacuity that its serious usage is so staggeringly and yet unintentionally ironic that it would make your brain melt if you dwelt on it for too long.)  Reading and discussing this article is really a morbidly fascinating excercise in deconstructing double bluff in a text that claims to expose bias but which itself is biased to the point of the most fantastical inventiveness. Equally interesting is analysing the process by which the distortion happens, attempting to determine whether it lies solely in the mental retardation and moral depravity of Richard Desmond, or whether it just panders to its swivel-eyed, frothy-mouthed, hairy-nostrilled, Diana-obsessed saloon-bar-boor readership, or whether these producers and consumers conspire in a lie-reinforcing loop of crypto-fascist philosophising and neo-Jeremiacal prophesying.

Anyway, I really wanted to have a pop at this lamentable lamentation right here in my blog, which I could then show to students. But then I realised that doing so would give too much away before the actual classroom exercises, effectively spoonfeeding, when another of the points of university learning is that a lot of it should be auto-didactic.  And that should certainly remain the case even in the future of high fees, or else we will be short-changing students on their £9,000 annual investments (and hopefully university senior managers will maintain this ideal against any countervailing pressures, rather than indulging in unprincipled, careerist caving to the powers-that-be).  Also, it’s possible that in the above I might already have given students the tiniest hint of an orientation towards the beginnings of an interpretative lead, which would be very bad indeed.  However, all is not lost.  Listening to certain Collaboration politicians spouting a certain word repeatedly in recent times, and hearing the Conservative Party Political Editor Nick Robinson parrot that word, I began to form an idea about how to teach new students about semiology. 

The word is “efficiencies.” What the word actually means is cuts, specifically cuts in public services (I add that qualification, by the way, in case you thought I meant cuts in bankers’ bonuses perhaps, or cuts in the tax loopholes used by Tory Party donors, which I didn’t, because the word cuts does not apply in any way in these areas).  Anyway, the thing about the term “efficiencies” is that it is meant to signify something while hiding something else, in this instance creating an illusion of cuts in public-service funding that occur without cuts taking place in actual public service provision. These sorts of linguistic gynmastics can also distort the reality of things to the point of suggesting the perfect opposite of their effects, in this instance when cuts actually lead to inefficiencies. Like when “efficiencies” mean that institutions can’t afford to replace ITC equipment, for example, so softwear systems crash, hardware packs up, and so everything takes ten times longer than it needs to, if it ever gets done at all. I pointed this out, using specific examples, to the Prime Minister’s spokesman/woman/person/thing/gimp Nick Robinson in a series of tweets that I then blogged here: http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-long-tweet-to-nick-robinson.html. He hasn't replied or in any way thanked me.

This of course is just one of a panoply of words and terms used by the modern master of mendacity David Cameron (post-Bliar, anyway—poor old Gordon Brown was just too tired and/or mad to still be able to lie convincingly by the time he finally became Prime Minister, and therefore lost the last election).  Others include such words as “equality” and “fairness,” slithering easily off the Old Etonian’s tongue even as he knowingly orients economic structures and social institutions even more to the benefit of the rich and to the detriment of the poor than was the case already.  And then there’s what is apparently the Prime Minister's favourite term: Big Society—a term that even Camerrhoids don’t seem fully to understand, but which, as far as I can tell, implies a return to the good old days of Victorian philanthropy, which, not coincidentally, requires the even more conspicuously unmentioned actuality of the bad old days of Victorian poverty.

Which brings me from words back to the idea.  The idea is for a glossary of terms that might similarly illustrate hidden biases in language, although part of the point here is that the hidden meanings are not actually that hard to find if you care to look into it a little bit.  In turn, this might provide a nice, gentle introduction to first-years to the importance of words, and to show them that semiotics is not mere semantics.  So, below, after this customarily long-winded and winding introduction, is a glossary of terms for a Tory history textbook.  The currently used tried-and-tested and widely-accepted terms are on the left.  On the right (see what I did there?—hurrr) are the new Tory terms, agreeable to the kinds of newspapers and the kinds of swivel-eyed, frothy-mouthed, hairy-nostrilled, Diana-obsessed saloon-bar-boors who do so much of Cameron’s work for him. Yes, some of these terms come from the New Labour era, but that of course should be no surprise to anyone and does not diminish for a minute their essential Toryism.

Medieval Society. Early Big Society.

Feudalism. Social responsibility.

Serfdom. Internship.

The Peasants’ Revolt. Class hatred (orig. David Starkey).

Enclosure. Land management efficiencies (necessary and unavoidable, no alternative, and not at all driven by ideology or class-interest).

The English/British/Civil War/s/Wars of the Three Kingdoms (etc.) / The Interregnum / The Glorious Revolution. The Unfortunate Disruptions.

The Renaissance/Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution. The Birth of Capitalism (orig. Niall Ferguson).

The Birth of Capitalism. The Enlightenment / The Great Going Forward (orig. Niall Ferguson). 

Imperialism/colonialism. Global democratisation (orig. Niall Ferguson).

Empire. Free-trade zone (orig. Niall Ferguson).

The Atlantic Slave Trade. African Labour Recruitment System THAT WAS ABOLISHED BY THE BRITISH (orig. Simon Schama).   

Slavery. Free Labour.

France. South Dorsetshire.

Germany. Unser Vaterland.

World War I. The Unfortunate Incident.

World War II. The Even More Unfortunate Incident.

Europe. Northern Africa.

The United States. Daddy.

Margaret Thatcher. Mummy.

Chartism. (See Peasants’ Revolt.)

Suffragettes. Lesbians.

The Working Classes. The Help (orig. Lucy Worsley).

The Welfare State. The Failed Soviet Union (orig. Dominic Sandbrook).

The National Health Service. The Sixty-Year Mistake. The Medical Business Opportunity.

The Tabloid Press. Our Friends in the North.

Bankers. Masters of the Universe.

 

You get the idea. Word.