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.

Defining Nick Clegg (or at least a kind of Cleggous phenomenology)

So Nick “Your Vote” Clegg has been at it again.  You know, lying, backsliding, you know the drill.  Longish ago, in the general election, his words about the NHS, tuition fees, and pretty much everything else that rolled off his slivery tongue have been contradicted by what he's since done. Back then, he was turned by the Bullingdon-wing of the Tory Party.  More recently, yesterday in fact, it turns out he originally intended in a speech to refer to opponents of equal marriage as bigots.  When found out, though, he said it was a “mistake” and that in fact he wouldn’t “insult” a spade by calling it a spade. To add a layer of irony to the otherwise simply twattish, this time he was turned by the traditional-(anti-gay)-marriage-defending-wing of a Church that was founded by a priapic syphilitic for the purpose of obtaining a divorce in order to produce a male heir to a throne he sat on to such tyrannical effect, and that was then re-founded by a “Virgin Queen” who never got married.  And there it is, Clegg-world in a nutshell, an absolutely batshit nutshell.  (Yes, I meant slivery.)

Of course, the original broken election promises are the worst of all the Cleggfucks we’ve been subjected to since that election.  In that campaign he made commitments that many people (myself included) voted for, and has since done the opposite of what those people gave him a mandate for.  He has thus done violence to democracy itself, as well as terrible damage to the people The Collaboration has committed itself to hurting to immeasurable but indubitably enormous effect.  (For a previous critique of a FibDem and an explanation of that term you can go to: http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/danny-alexander-and-pathetic-drivelling.html.)  And while dedicated Liberal Democrats (by which I mean people dedicated to the Liberal Democratic Party, but who clearly don’t give a Tom Tit about liberality or democracy) will continue to vote for whatever their leaders claim to believe in next time around, I don’t think any voters who voted for them on the basis of their purported principles will be doing so again. At least as long as Nick Your Vote Clegg and all his fellow collaborators are in charge (including Vince This is My Power Cable).  But it does of course raise once again the question of who is Nick Clegg?  Or, rather, who is Nick Clegg today?  Because, for sure, being “Nick Clegg” is, at any one time, an entirely temporary condition.  So the question is actually quite pointless, except in as much as it throws up opportunities for pointing and laughing, which, we can safely presume, will remain a legal activity for as long as Nick Clegg doesn’t promise that it will.

So, who is Nick Clegg?  Let’s try to define Clegg, but just, as I say, for a bit of a laugh.  Certainly, the kindest things you can say about him are that he’s open-minded, receptive to new ideas, flexible, and likes working with others.  These might well be suitable and indeed desirable qualities in the right circumstances, such as being a fictional or at least fictionalised character in a satirical sitcom that skewers the amorality and consequent hypocrisies of certain types of power-hungry politicians.  Although preferably not one written by Armando Iannucci, a satirist who now sells his wares to Sky, which perhaps finally unlocks the mystery of how it is that the characters he creates are such perfect incarnations of amorality and hypocrisy.  Sadly, however, Clegg’s qualities are entirely unsuited and indeed are or ought to be absolutely antithetical to being an actual party-leader in a real-world democracy.  Indeed, in these respects he’s about useful as Iannuccism is as a political philosophy, or even as a serious as well as piss-taking (i.e. properly satirical) critique of politics.  For more and much greater expertise on Iannuccian politics, in fact anti-politics, see: http://nottspolitics.org/2012/06/18/the-anti-politics-of-the-thick-of-it/

But, just because defining “Clegg” as Clegg is pointless, on account what we might also generously refer to as his mercuriality, doesn’t mean we can’t use the word “Clegg” as a prefix (or for that matter a suffix, but I’m going here with prefix) for all kinds of things that are Cleggacious; that is, things that reflect the characteristics of Nick Clegg.  Politicians’ names have long been used for their illustrative qualities beyond their immediate context but still in related contexts, sometimes in metaphorical and other allusory fashions.  Thus “Machiavellian” needn’t just narrowly refer to a Florentine renaissance philosopher’s expertise in high-order, low-down political chicanery, but can also refer more broadly to unscrupulous shenanigans in modern politics, office politics, business more widely, and in the administration of football associations. And just as “Stalinist” refers most directly to a ruthless dictator who murderously attempted to control all aspects of life in the old Soviet Union, it might also refer to a particularly odious ex- who tried to supervise every moment of your time, monitored your communications, and burned photographs of your previous partners.  It is in these latter spirits that I think we can define “Clegg” the word, if not Clegg the man, and try to identify an essence of Clegg, a Cleggness, perhaps even a kind of meta-Clegg, or a sort of phenomenology of the Cleggous.

Cleggot: one who claims to oppose bigotry and bullying until confronted by bigots and bullies, whereupon he or she (he) teams up with bigots and bullies.

Clegg (verb form): 1. To obtain votes by deception.  2. An inconvenient bodily motion associated with a particular kind of frightening incident, as in “The new boy promised to protect Tom and Scud from the beastly bullies, but then the fiendish Flashman appeared and, alas, the poor chap clegged his pants.”  3. The act of abandoning your erstwhile friends in an unprincipled and cowardly fashion.  As in, “The new boy promised to help Tom and Scud protect the tuck shop in which all the lads had invested together, but when Flashman and his friends came along he clegged-it as quickly as he could (although bearing in mind that he’d also clegged himself, his gait had a rather awkward prospect!), leaving his former friends overwhelmed and the greedy fiends free to steal everyone else’s goodies.”

Cleggottery: unlike a lottery, which has constant rules and in which everyone has an equal chance of winning and losing, a cleggottery has rules that change once the game is over, to the effect that all the winnings are then given to bankers and their political enablers, all ex-private schoolboys with vast amounts of inherited wealth originally generated by off-shore no-tax schemes.

Cleggervane: A sort of a-moral compass that at one moment follows the direction of the wind, but which, when manipulated by evil forces, turns at a Clegg-Angle.

Clegg-Angle: an angle of exactly 180-degrees, and, in fact, therefore, not actually an “angle” at all.

Cleggebrae: an internal apparently skeletal structure than can give an organism an appearance of considerable substance, but which is illusory, and so the organism will in fact quickly decay into insubstantiality. That is, what bananas are made of that makes them look all firm and yellow and lovely to begin with but then turns them into a shitty-looking mush of transcendental hideousness.   

     

Cleggeology: a specialist field within the discipline of geology that explores illusory and unstable terrestrial phenomena such as mirages, shifting ground, and quicksand.

Cleoggology: a kind of secular theology that involves the study of ineffable phenomena, self-contradicting pseudo-philosophies, and charming prophecies that will never be fulfilled.

Clegguistics: the ability to speak on all levels of untruth in many different languages.

Post-clegguistics: the inability to speak any kind of truth in any language.

Cleggygraph: a kind of polygraph that can see into the future and is thus equipped to unmask those who can lie so convincingly that only events that have not yet happened can uncover their mendacity.  Unfortunately, the cleggygraph is still only at a conceptual level of development, and so for now voters (and, if only vote-stealing was actually a crime, the police) must continue to make judgments based on Cleggsperience.

Cleggsperience: the fact of having been lied to on such a scale that you could never possibly believe the particular chubby-faced interlocutor again. It can lead to feelings of incleggulousness, to which only the cleggulous are immune.   

Incleggulous: a feeling of shock at a betrayal of such transparency and moral enormity that is beyond the relatively innocuous feeling of mere incredulousness.  As in, “Oh my God! I thought I was voting for a socially progressive political platform as expressed in the official Xxxxxxx-Xxxxxxxx Party Manifesto, but in government they are betraying their democratic promises and are actually dismantling the very fabric of the civil society I believe in and upon which all things decent and just must depend. I am absolutely incleggulous!”

    

Cleggulous: the ability to be fooled a second time by someone who has already proven themselves to be a most fantastical liar.  This ability represents such an extreme form of delusion that it is in fact a form of mental disability, although experts are divided on whether or not it actually constitutes an illness.  Nevertheless, the degree of intellectual debility required to be medically certifiable as cleggulous was illustrated by George W. Bush when he said, as he did in Nashville, Tennessee, on 17 September 2002, “Fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me -- you can’t get fooled again.”

Cleggology: an apology that is so breath-takingly ill-judged and of such staggering inadequacy that absolutely no one takes it in the least bit seriously and all everyone can do is laugh, mock, and make spoof youtube videos out of it.    

           

 

A long tweet to Nick Robinson

Dear @bbcnickrobinson, I see you’ve taken to using the word “efficiencies” for government cuts, 1/10

@bbcnickrobinson so I would like to tell you why “efficiencies” is an inaccurate term. 2/10

@bbcnickrobinson My old computer, which my university can’t afford to replace right now, 3/10

@bbcnickrobinson has just crashed 6 times in an hour, costing me a great deal of time. 4/10

@bbcnickrobinson This is just one small example of 1000s every day in universities, 5/10

@bbcnickrobinson and millions across the public sector, of how cuts cause inefficiencies. 6/10

@bbcnickrobinson Of course no proper journalist would knowingly use inaccurate terms, 7/10

@bbcnickrobinson & so now I’ve explained to you how inaccurate this term is, 8/10

@bbcnickrobinson you no longer have any good reason for using it. 9/10

@bbcnickrobinson You’re welcome. 10/10