AFFECTIVE RHETORIC AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DETERMINATE NEGATION

Abstract

My analysis of political debate in the United Kingdom during the summer of 2016 unpacks the compression of two highly complex issues within an unprecedented moment in British politics: reinvestment in nuclear arms (Trident) and nuclear energy (Hinkley Point C) during the EU referendum crisis. I recover unities and discontinuities across events in this period and throughout history both to examine the non-identity between the particular and the universal as a major trope in parliamentary rhetoric, which construed the universal sentiment of world peace and denied this in terms of security, and to seek out the use of determinate negation, especially when it has bearing on the advancing of climate-related policies. From nuanced speeches in the House of Commons and House of Lords, I move tentatively outwards by gesturing to the moment of truth in reified concepts, seeking to pry them open in their non-identity with art objects of the Anthropocene that are understood within a context of ecological poetics.

Keywords:

• climate change
• EU referendum
• Hinkley Point C
• parliament
• Trident

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The EU referendum was held on 23 June 2016. The first reading of the Private Member's Bill, sponsored by Baroness Falkner of Margravine: 24 May 2016; second reading: 8 July 2016. Iraq Inquiry, aka Chilcot: 6 July. There are ten stages to the passing of a bill (five stages in each of the houses). The 2016–17 session of parliament has prorogued (discontinued without dissolving) and this bill is unable to make further progress (“Armed Forces Deployment”; “The Iraq Inquiry”).

2 Margaret the Virgin (Margaret of Antioch) is known as Saint Marina the Great Martyr in the east, and is thus associated with the sea, and consequently linked to Aphrodite (Greek “aphros” meaning “sea-foam”). St Dunstan installed a community of Benedictine monks there more than 1,000 years before the current parliamentary session.

3 Perhaps it would be too daring or fanciful to have named this court after the Star Chamber that sat at the Palace of Westminster throughout the sixteenth century, an efficient court under the Plantagenets and Tudors. The “Supreme Court” is a name that seems to intentionally conflate American and British justice systems, leading to confusion. When the reconfiguration of Britain's constitution inhabits this mode of British–American relations, the apparent self-election into the role of “Airstrip One” as George Orwell would put it in 1984 belies the fact that a recent trend recent in British politics aspires to a model of British justice having more in common with the American system than with Europe. Inherited from Roman law across the Continent, British justice from the medieval period onwards contends with English remoteness and inhabits a resource-starved pragmatic approach to things, a spirit of governance that evolves into the law of precedent in the United States.

4 Claire Mills and Oliver Hawkins, “Replacing the UK's ‘Trident’ Nuclear Deterrent,” Commons Briefing Paper CBP-7353. Trident is housed at Clyde naval base on the west coast of Scotland; Faslane was first constructed and used in the Second World War, the bastion considered a useful geographic location during the Cold War. The Scottish National Party and Scottish Labour Party do not want continued deployment of Trident at Clyde.

5 Trident Ploughshares occupied the Westminster parliamentary lobby from 16:00 to 22:15.

6 Lord Whitty is good on what our political leaders were doing during the stock drop:

My noble friend Lord Radice said that in effect we have no government in this country at the moment, and no opposition, and he is right. To be slightly more facetious, on the Saturday after the referendum result, there was a point when the Prime Minister had resigned, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had gone AWOL, the leader of the Opposition was pronounced officially to be in bed and the then-assumed next Prime Minister was playing cricket, while sterling was already falling and the prospects for the markets were already appallingly facing us. The Government need to get their act together and so does this House. (“Outcome of the European Union Referendum”)

7 Of these transactions, one third are euro denominated. Businesses desire trading on the same platform, so Britain's loss of euro clearing would trigger the loss of dollar clearing, thus extracting a substantial amount of liquidity in the market, which trickles into the funding of public services.

8 It is one of three representations of humanitarian figures: Ghandi, Mandela, Lincoln – with the exception of the former Prime Minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, all others are male UK parliamentarians.

9 The people of Manchester met on New Year's Eve, 1862; their letter is dated 1 January 1863, the same date as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that changed the status of more than three million enslaved people in ten states, from “slave” to “free.” The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the “Lancashire Cotton Famine” (1861–65) historically parenthesize the writing of the Communist Manifesto (1848) and place the world's first industrialized city in the forefront of British social history.

10 The phrase is inscribed in the Manchester monument. Written by Lincoln little more than two weeks after the Manchester letter was posted via the American Embassy, and submitted to the President by his Secretary of State, William H. Seward via Charles Francis Adams, United States Minister to the United Kingdom, during the Christmas period at the centre of the Civil War; in which time Lincoln's suffocating political embattlement raised to enlist the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution incredibly allowed time for a clear head and good prose.

11 This term for scaremongering amongst pro-unionists was first used during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and was apposite for the tactics of the 2016 EU referendum.

12 This question was presumably put to the Secretary of State for Defence, Mr Phillip Hammond. This role was occupied by Churchill throughout 1940–45 and 1951–52, while Prime Minister on both occasions. Hammond was replaced by Michael Fallon on the day after Buscombe asked the question during May's first cabinet reshuffle.

13 Lord Sterling of Plaistow argued for the importance of an observation made by Lord Ramsbottom: “Until 2010, the capital cost of our nuclear deterrent was carried by the Treasury. It was put on the Ministry of Defence's account only some five or six years ago” (UK Parliament, Defence: Continuous At-Sea Deterrent).

14 The United Kingdom built the world's first industrial-scale nuclear power station (the first of four Magnox reactors) in Cumbria (Calder Hall) in 1956 from machine tools developed for the military during the Second World War, but now lacks the skills and investment to develop Hinkley Point C. At Calder Hall, leaked radioactive waste was discovered in 2005; the reactors were closed on 30 December 2015; it will take 100 years to fully decommission the plant.

15 The McCoys’ song was recorded by Bowie in France, 1973; it featured in John Cusack's film War, Inc., 2008.

16 “Cameron Quits”: BBC investigative report into dispute between pro-Cameron and pro-May MPs – 11 September.

17 For world trends (1980–2014), see the following sources: <http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Generation-by-Energy-Source#tspQvChart> and <http://unstats.un.org/unsd/energy/balance/>.

18 The synthesis of sciences of mind and nature in Bateson (491) and Ingold suggests different degrees of socio-biology deriving from E.O. Wilson and the notion of a creative advance into novelty in A.N. Whitehead, yet all emphasize the organism as the embodiment of a life process within a holistic topological field.

19 The website is run by Climate Communication Fellow Dr John Cook, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland.

20 “Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power” (Critique of the Gotha Programme – letter to the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, May 1875).

21 MacDiarmid's On a Raised Beach opens with the statement that “All is lithogenesis” to outline the relationship between stone and writing that transports the reader into the most incredible lexicon.