So I was recommended this blog post. Don’t bother – this is better.
It’s a pity there’s no video, at least that I’ve found, because of course the banner is part of an integrated performance from the Red Faction, the Middlesbrough FC ultras. But to get a sense, try this.
OK? Now we’re oriented, that blog post. I’m sure they mean well, but really, terministic? Did we really need doxosophers? What on earth is a polygraph – a lie-detector? – and how does it get to be polymorphous? Apparently the “marginalised” can be found being “spatially marginalised” and the word “spatial” is used in every other sentence, but there are no rockets. I can actually read German faster than I could read this piece. And just look at the title! Even the choice of typeface is hostile, anti-access, and overdesigned, the absolute opposite of Orwell’s idea of plain style.
The point they want to make is basically the same as the Middlesbrough fans did. Now there’s a shorter for you. Actually, I kid, it’s a bit more than that.
Their point is that identifying places and individual people with the idea of poverty is a good way to stereotype the poor. Broken people live in broken Britain and that’s why they’re broken. Once you’ve done this, the poverty’s not an economic problem any more – it’s because there’s something wrong with the people. Politicians like this because it means the answer is less money, but more control. Something like Benefits Street provides the stereotype. It gets recycled by people like Christian Guy at Iain Duncan Smith’s thinktank, who have one foot in politics and one outside, and who add their solutions to it. Then the politicians pick it up and use those solutions on you. The way we describe things or people changes what we do with them, and that’s why it’s worth protesting this stuff.
All clear so far? Well, it took them 3,600 words to say that. In case you’re wondering, Christian Guy is both a doxosopher and apparently a polymorphous polygraph, your house is spatial, and TV is terministic. Personally, I prefer wanktanks, like thinktanks but entirely fake.
But the depressing thing here is that this post is a perfect example of the ideas the people who wrote it use to study society. The jargon I’ve been taking the piss about is borrowed from the works of Pierre Bourdieu, French sociologist and philosopher. Among much else, he thought that the language we use to talk about stuff was politically important in itself, and of course he was right.
Put it like this: If you want to read that blog post, you’re expected to know how a doxosopher might end up being terministic. You’re also expected to realise that the polygraph isn’t a lie-detector and perhaps to appreciate that calling someone a polymorphous polygraph might sound good in French. And because all these words were invented on a Latin basis, it might even help to have some classics. You’re also expected to appreciate the funny typeface in the headline, rather than just wish it was something more legible.
He argued that this was a kind of capital, like the economic sort: cultural capital. People without it, or without the right kind of it, are denied access to parts of society. Up to a point, it can be a substitute for the economic kind, but it’s never a complete substitute. If you have enough of it, you can get access to the rich and the powerful and to some of the things they do, but you won’t be one of them unless you get rich. In the opposite sense, vulgar rich people with no culture are common enough to be a cliché – but they’re still rich unless they lose all their money.
To his great credit, Bourdieu applied this to the academic world where he spent his whole life, pointing out that different specialities and professions tended to invent their own weird languages in order to keep other people out. Because each speciality gets to pick who comes in, it gets a sliver of power and status. However, because this basically comes from the power to exclude people without the right kind of capital, it also restricts the effects of whatever the academics might learn.
If you’re likely to be affected by Universal Credit or the bedroom tax, you probably won’t read that blog post, or if you do you might not get past those bloody doxosophers. This is precisely what Bourdieu would have predicted. But I doubt he would have been at all pleased.
I think you over-sold that blog post a bit – I was quite disappointed by how easily I could read it. Awful stuff, though. They have got a good point, but you made it in one paragraph.
You’re right about the protective armature of awful (and in this case barely-anglicised) jargon. What really bugs me is the lexical shift (sorry!) that happens several times, particularly towards the end – all of a sudden our polymorphous doxosophers have turned into “thinktank blowhards” and “intellectual lackeys”. I was half expecting them to call Fraser Nelson an irritating twat and have done with it. I found this disappointing twice over – on one hand, if they want to write a Socialist Worker editorial I’d rather they just did it without all the jargon; on the other, if they do want to write a Socialist Worker editorial that’s up to them, but I’d rather not be asked to read it.
But of course the shift only happens when the authors feel they’ve paid their theoretical dues – and, incidentally, shed any readers who think in those terms without also having a full stock of Bourdieuvian jibber-jabber at their fingertips. It’s a performance.