Re: Its a Language thing
just a small correction to david's post: "The UK doesn't have a market of hundreds of millions of people," he writes: "it did once but we voted to leave". In fact the vote was over leaving the European Union. Mad King Boris decided that meant also quitting the common market, which wasn't on the ballot, largely because it would have swayed an already narrow majority towards defeat. The method in this madness was entirely internal to the Tory Party; and this may have lessons for all two-party systems where any chance of power has to be fought in faction wars within big parties, unlike European systems that encourage minor parties. (Anglophones describe these systems as 'unstable', despite the notorious instability of large parties like the demented Republicans or the splintered Conservatives) Boris made the extremist call on total Brexit from sympathy with and succumbing to the power of the faction known as the Tory backwoodsmen. Nietzsche punned on the equivalent (Hinterwäldler) when he described metaphysicians as 'backworldsmen', people who believed in an invisible world behind this one that was truly real and permanent. Tory backworldsmen believe in an essential, unchanging 'real' England (rarely the Celtic fringes) which it is their obsession to reveal. It was this cult – a minority which holds some crucial voting power – which demanded the referendum, fuelled the propaganda machine surrounding it, and demanded an extremist interpretation of the result - there was no "we" [in a footnote, I still prefer the email forum for all the excellent reasons debated over the last few days - by all means document on an interactive platform and increase spread etc but do keep this more personal commons] Seán Cubitt | He/Him Professor of Screen Studies School of Culture and Communication W104 John Medley Building University of Melbourne Grattan Street Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA I acknowledge the Boonwurrong and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation on whose unceded lands I live and work New publications: Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media special issue Visual Cultural Studies (Rivista semestrale di cultura visuale). 2022. https://vcsmimesis.org/ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Its a Language thing
It’s a Language Thing In a brilliant article in the FT, last September, Janen Ganesh correctly predicted that as ever the US mid term elections would be obsessively followed by the English political elite when many of the same people would struggle to name a cabinet minister in Berlin or Paris. The EU, Ganesh points out, is a regulatory superpower but our political class is far more interested in Iowa. From the perspective of a UK citizen the impact of this obsession is non-trivial. It is in fact the key to understanding the trouble we are in. The UK's political elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. And it has led the nation to act as though they too were a superpower… The question is why? Ganesh insists we do not invoke the usual bogyman of imperial nostalgia (if it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Instead he suggests we blame the distorting effect of language. Its because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations are comparable… Former Prime Minister Mad queen Liz and her Chancellor are not alone in the modern Tory party in their conviction that a bracing dose of deregulation would be enough to unchain Britania releasing US levels of entrepreneurial dynamism. But of course it won't. As Ganesh pointed out "The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people…" it did once but we voted to leave… David Garcia # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
