‘No-one listens to us’: Post-truth, affect and Brexit

ABSTRACT

The 2016 referendum result with a majority for Brexit came as a surprise to many in metropolitan centres. Deep divisions were exposed that appeared to have largely been hidden from those centres. In the wake of this, many explanations were put forward: perhaps most importantly, the notion of ‘post-truth’ gained a new prominence. The paper argues that post-truth could be said to depend upon notions of virality, contagion and harks back to founding work in social psychology relating to Le Bon’s work on crowds. In doing so, it concentrates on issues of class, especially in relation to affect and working-class voters. It does so by referring to a small funded study with two South Wales communities, exploring their views on and their demands and desires after Brexit. Considering the outcomes of that work leads to the discussion of the affective histories and practices of the communities involved and asks how we might research working class histories and practices in a non-pathologising way. The paper concludes with a discussion of some examples of approaches that provide suggestive ways forward for future research in this field.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• post-truth
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Althusser’s move to ideology after the so-called failure of the workers to join the students in May 1968 may not seem entirely relevant to the present discussion, but we might also note that this was a previous moment at which the failure of the working class to deliver what was desired by the Left gave rise to new accounts, in this case, of ideology to explain this failure. Such debates were instrumental in my own intellectual formation, and led to the interest in subjectivity, structuralism and later post-structuralism, While Althusser (1975) made a huge move away from determination by the economy towards what he called Ideological State Apparatuses, he argued that such ISA’s were productive of subject-positions, or that they interpellated subjects. To do this he referred to Lacanian psychoanalysis. I think two things are important for the argument here. One is the disputed sense that in order to explain a political defeat, access to ideology and psyches of the working class had been focused on, leading to a repudiation of material conditions of work and economic aspects. When Althusser argued for a determination in the last instance by the economy, but a last instance that never comes, he opened the way to many developments that focused on ideological and later discursive processes as well as psychic resources, and concern with the economy faded from much work within the humanities and social sciences. Notwithstanding the fact that the non-participation of the workers is much-debated (e.g. Duhan 2013), it is the prefiguring of the turn to affect already within the turn to discourse that I wish to gesture towards. The other is that it is the control by the state (including the media) of identities and the meanings producing those identities shifted the entire debate over working class political participation onto the constitution of subjectivities and away from any economic debate.

² ie Lexit, that is, the return to the position before the 1975 referendum about continued British membership of the European Economic Community, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36367246.

³ I developed the term ‘affective practice’ to build upon the earlier term ‘discursive practice’ as articulated in Henriques et al. (1984). The way that I used it attempted to work with the specificity of practices that were shared by the members of Steeltown but had a strong affective resonance (Walkerdine 2010; Walkerdine and Jimenez 2012). As Margie Wetherell (2012) acknowledges, she took this term from me and worked with it in a very different way. Thus, when I refer to this term within my own work, it refers to the approach that I articulated in the Steeltown work and not Wetherell (2012)..

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council; Arts and Humanities Research Council AHRC.

Notes on contributors

Valerie Walkerdine

Valerie Walkerdine is Distinguished Research Professor in thew School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. She has been working on issues of class for many years and is currently working on a book, provisionally entitled 'Neoliberalism's Daughters', which works with longitudinal data on working and middle class families, with daughters born in the 1970s, showing the differential classed effects and affects of the emergence of neoliberalism.