Brexit — A Hauntology
“Stay you imperfect speakers, tell me more” — Macbeth, Act 1 Scene iii.
Just a day or two before Christmas, with Parliament broken up in all of the ways, I sat one night having a nightcap with an old friend who has spent his life much closer to politics than I have, with extensive time in the senior Civil Service and inside Number 10 too.
Not wanting to spoil a fine evening we mostly avoided the ‘B’ word, but just as I was about to leave we fell to talking about what might happen next. Perhaps with Dickens’ Christmas Carol in mind, perhaps with some discussion of my book After Magic, one of us couched a response in terms of haunting, and as I stumbled home through the fog that night home that night this idea stalked me, groaned within me, insisted that I write. And so I did.
If Earth gifts us a future from which to look back on these times, one of the phrases that historians will surely argue over with relish will be Theresa May’s fateful pronouncement that “Brexit means Brexit.” The people had spoken, and what they wanted was so intangible, so diverse, so unutterable in so many of its taboos and toxic undercurrents that it defied decent description.
It was itself, and that was all that could be said.
For May, this was to be her bane: rising from the bloody scene of so much in-party back-stabbing, she now had to bring into being this which existed as a single word only; a thing virtually without language, let alone form. Her premiership would be judged on whether she could draw aside the endless veils of metaphor and see if there was actually an Actually Existing Entity that could be delivered, could be made to live.
The metaphors only multiplied at even the thought of this. Some described her task as like making a submarine out of cheese, others as a casting a chocolate teapot. But perhaps as she pushed past shrouds and projections, shadows and mirrors of mirrors in search of some true kernel, what she had set herself was more difficult and far more complex: perhaps she bound herself to the burden of making a ghost live, to taking a spectre and forging for it a body.
Problematically for all of us, regardless of our initial vote, after two years of conjuring there is no handsome being. Both sides seem to agree on this: all she has for her spell in Number 10 is a zombie, neither living nor dead, an inanimate-yet-rotting corpse that engenders near universal disgust. Perhaps now as the horror of this non-existence rushes towards us, we might be prepared to admit that Brexit isa ghost, a phantom that has spooked this country and must now, finally, be faced down.
If so, the question that presses and chills is this: what does one do with a haunting? It may well be that politicians are not best placed to answer.
The phrase ‘hauntology’ was coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. The book took its title from Marx’s declaration in The Communist Manifesto that ‘a spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.’ With that grim phantom now mostly exorcised, Europe now has to deal with another hungry ghost.
For Derrida, to speak of hauntology was preferable to speaking of ontology. In his philosophy, being was not a straightforward state but an amalgam of influences, many of which crawl from other times in the past, or are wails from futures-already-dying. For hauntology, the present moment is not a point of pure existence, but a kind of manifestation of all of these other spectral forces. The ghosts he describes are deconstructive figures hovering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established certainties vacillate. They cannot be ‘known’ in the certain ways that we desperately want things to be known.
How are such ghosts formed? Shifting planes again, a psychologist might politely call reports of paranormal activity ‘anomalous experiences,’ and explain that they, ‘frequently occur as a specific reaction to negative life events, in which case they mainly take the form of non-pathological hallucinations.’
As we discover after the unmasking, in the huddled conclusions of ghost stories we find some incident had incited a rupture in this silo of negative emotion and from this the spectre rose. (The spectre of communism might thus be framed as a wealth-shifting poltergeist born of the collective trauma of a people downtrodden, a phantom that took shape when pain, grief and suffering were given no healthy outlet.)
Might Brexit have risen from a similar manifestation of suppressed negative energies? People in so many communities across the UK have been ignored, have been strung up by policies of austerity. The richest in society continued to profit after the banking crisis of 2008 while overseeing the slashing of council services, the raiding of hard-won pensions and the decimation of state benefits. Yet in the Leave campaign, blame was often put elsewhere.
Students of literature will recognise the pattern: when ghosts appear they rarely tell an unbiased truth. What Macbeth hears in the imperfect speech of the occult figures are claims of raw facts. But they are not. Instead they are words that weave themselves around his grave-buried desires, generate the semblance of flesh around rattling bones by taking one skewed projection of reality and weaving both terror and excitement from it.
Thus bewitched, Macbeth, unlike Banquo, feels that his destiny is now out of his control. What he has witnessed cannot be denied or doubted, but has to be acted on. Thinking that dark powers have enabled and empowered him, in fact the terrible spectres are only given power by the way in which he — Macbeth — then acts.
Just a few years ago British membership of the EU didn’t make it into the top 10 political priorities for the vast majority of the country. Suddenly, we were being led to believe that fleeing Europe was the most important and urgent thing that we could do. Definitive action. Taking back control. Wielding the knife. Ignore the scourge of austerity; point the bloody finger at the ghoulish migrants come to suck the life out of us.
Yet what if the ghost is lying?
According to Freud:
“in an analysis . . . a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.”
If the ghost is not telling the truth, it will not be laid to rest. Ask any analyst: lies have a habit of living on until they are revealed.
How then might we break this dead-lock, this spell-binding that May’s New Year’s call for unity will absolutely not lay to rest, this ‘anomalous experience’ that has paralysed our politics?
To ask again, what does one do with a haunting?
When faced with reports of a ghost, there are perhaps three ways to approach. The first is to deny its existence entirely, to scoff at the very idea of a spectral reality. This was Remain at its most patronising: to even consider Brexit would be nonsense because there are no legitimate grievances over Europe and our place in the EU. There should never have been a vote in the first place.
The second approach is the exact opposite: the existence of the ghost is an unimpeachable fact. Fifty-two percent of the people claim to have seen the ghost, so the ghost is real and no further doubts must be entertained. This is the position that both May and Corbyn have taken. Terrified by the prospect of being told that they aren’t obedient to democracy they insist on marching onwards, continuing to declare that we are haunted and must serve the ghost that has risen… even if they don’t much believe in it themselves. In doing so, they make Macbeth’s mistake, confusing hauntology with ontology, submitted will and intellect to an ill-defined hex, prepared to wreak terrible destruction in service of it.
The problem that all sides currently face with these two failed approaches is that their faces need saving. No one wants to back down, opinions are more and more entrenched because of the shame mechanisms that prevent us from admitting our errors. May won’t budge: it’s her deal or no deal. Corbyn wants to be faithful to the forgotten working class communities who voted Leave even though doing this would end up harming their prospects, backing himself — like May — into an impossible corner.
The rising of the spectre has petrified our politics, left both Prime Minister and Opposition Leader trapped between rocks and hard places. But — at the risk of reanimating another ghost — there is perhaps a third way, one guided by the wisdom of the therapist now that the bluster of the politicians has led us nowhere, one that might just offer thanks to the spectre even while it refuses to be obedient to it.
In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon explores how Freud attempted to tread this narrow path between denial of anomalous experiences and focusing too heavily on them. In his own writings, Freud relates the story of a train journey where, sitting in his dim-lit compartment, a particularly violent jolt of the train caused a door to swing open and an elderly gentleman to loom towards him. Disgusted by the appearance of this old man, it was only when Freud looks up for a second time that he realised that the man was himself, reflected in the long washroom mirror attached to the back of the swinging door.
‘The uncanny is drawing Freud away from himself. He looks in the mirror and sees an elderly man, an appearance distasteful to him. He is not himself, he is strange, a stranger to himself. Freud does not believe in ghosts, but he cannot quite get it out of his mind that […] the vestiges of an old animism have stalked him to the train.’
Is this not the uncanny gift that Brexit has offered us? Though we may never have wanted this, we have been drawn away from too-comforting a view of ourselves. In the shocking reflection we have glimpsed things in us all as a nation that are distasteful, aspects that we did not want to see. Comfortable arrogance in the South East and other metropolitan areas. Fear and distrust in rural England. A poor understanding of our national identity, and how our relationship with the rest of the EU functions. Yet, though the ghost itself has not been truthful, it has offered in its trauma an opportunity for us to learn about what is under our own skins. All of us.
The vital task here is not to deny the haunting visions, nor to conclude that they are the unadulterated truth. To put it in other language: the ghost must neither Remain nor Leave. If we are to learn from it it shouldn’t be denied nor chased away; the therapeutic approach is to take gravely seriously the experience of haunting, while committing to deal with the suppression that has generated it.
Now that so much has been uncovered on all sides does this not mean daring — like Freud — a second look? Might this not mean drawing together our courage and demanding of the imperfect voice, ‘tell me more’? Theresa May insists that looking again would be a betrayal of the slim majority of those who were convinced by the ghost at the first glance. I think that the opposite is true. We must credit each of us with honesty, with legitimate expression, take absolutely seriously the spectre that has presented itself. But — just as it would be autocratic to assume the role of external physician — we must all, together, in humility, offer to look again now that the original shock of what has arisen has passed. This second look is not undemocratic, because it by definition reengages us all in more democracy, refuses that there are some who get the final say on what was seen.
Against this negative panic, against the ghoulish running from free votes, the desperate facade of animation around a deal that nobody believes is good, what a second look might deliver could be wholly positive. Committing to listen to genuine grievances of those communities who have been disenfranchised but resisting the gross demonisation of migration, committing to clearing the fog of opaque financial rigging of our economy for a dishonest elite, we have an opportunity to learn from this moment of haunting rather than be destroyed by it.
To do so would be to snatch a victory that every strata of society could celebrate, to snatch it from the arrogance of wealthy and cosseted remainers so insulated from the worst effects of austerity, to snatch it from the law-breaking of Arron Banks, the cynical jaw-jaw of Farage and the Dickensian stink that Mr Rees Mogg would have us run blind into. To do so would for Brexit to finally mean something other than itself.
What is needed to shoot for this victory is not to run away spooked. What is needed is courage, is backbone where there is currently only apparition (and internal doubt enough to rival Hamlet). What is needed is a political daring that both May and Corbyn must quickly find. If they cannot, or will not, others with it must rise up and challenge them or this phantom will continue to menace us for years to come.
© Kester Brewin Jan 2019
