The Public on the Public

The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure

C. Westall, M. Gardiner

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137351333
• eBook ISBN: 9781137351340
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

In Britain, the resistance to popular determination allowed by the financial construct of the public has been so successful that this term, public, must be re-read as politically paralyzing. The problem, our problem, is the public - which we are so often told will bring us together and provide for us - and it is this we must move beyond.

1

Introduction: We Are Not ‘the Public’

Abstract: This opening chapter lays the grounds for our reading of the discursive formation of the British public. This public emerges with the establishment of financial management as the governing principle of the unifying British state, and its pragmatic version of property-based citizenship. The public is, and has always been, an encoding of financial stability, working to create a public ‘we’ or financially realist ‘us’ made familiar through wartime consensus. Here, we contend that, in Britain’s case, the resistance to popular determination enabled by this public has been so successful that the term ‘public’ must be re-read as politically paralysing. Indeed, the problem, or our problem, is the public – that which we are so often told will bring us together and provide for us.

Keywords: British left; British public; discursive form; financial realism; state formation

Westall, Claire and Michael Gardiner. The Public on the Public: The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137351340.0003.

We are not ‘the public’ because the British public is not a collective us. It is not made up of people, or free citizens, and it is not an agent of collective action – however forcefully it lays claim to the terms of the communal. The public is the very means by which the population is captured, relieved of collective desires and turned back towards un-ending and ever-tightening expropriation – across land, via labour and with the penetration of the personal. In this fashion, the public’s mode of compulsory inclusion – historic and continuant – belies its anti-communal function as it works through consensus to hold people, the people, at bay and to foreclose any possibility of a citizenship based in the commons.

Britain’s public ‘we’ is financially realist

As has often been charted, the conception of res publica has a long and international history, and in recent years this has been revisited in debates about a crisis of the public realm caused by capitalism’s late, or neoliberal, phase.¹ Responding to such debates, this discussion looks at the discursive form and cultural life of the British public. Conceived as universal and permanent in the constitutional doctrines of the late seventeenth century, the British public is bolstered in the eighteenth century, reinforced through empire in the nineteenth, and then radically strengthened ‘at home’ during the twentieth against threats seemingly posed to its eternal way of life. This public is specific to the world’s first modern empire, and – within the remnants of empire and international prestige – it establishes an almost unchallengeable totality of consensus during and after World War II. Further, the consensual confidence of this self-referential modern public instills political paralysis as continuity while advancing and masking its own efforts to naturalise accumulation. Reliant on an early, imperial definition of the universal as ‘natural reason’, the public is premised on a violent mode of inclusion, which, as it becomes familiar, defines the entire terrain of the communal. This is the case across British history, perhaps obviously so during territorial empire, but it becomes newly ‘total’ after the Blitz, 1940–1, as consensus is mobilised for profit-oriented institutions and organisational bodies mining value in increasingly immaterial forms.

We see this public as a culturally dominant discursive form that works out from the apparatus necessary for the informal mode of governance particular to Britain’s unwritten and flexible constitution,² and as unfolding within the ‘governmentalisation of the state’.³ Our reading takes up a number of Habermasian concerns – the historical formation of the public, its critical impetus, the role of the domestic sphere, and the import of literary education.⁴ However, it views these issues through the history of the newly unified state and its progressive conception of citizenship – for which no sovereignty can exist outside of property, or debt, and the ensuing economic rationalism that enjoys critical reflexivity.⁵ For our purposes, it is imperative that the British public is understood as a discursive form, emerging as the unifying state and its commercial empire take finance as their structuring principle. From its inception, then, the public is created for, and determined by, the British imperial state’s need for financial stability, or even-ness (which is not equality), across times, territories and populations, making financial trust, as public opinion, the primary tool of its expansion. Aggressive adaptation and self-sustaining mutation become this public’s defining characteristics. Understood in this way, rather than as an imagined base unit of democratic process, Britain’s public can be seen as a set of discursive strategies – or a distinct cultural register – tied to financial expansionism backed by constant war, and set towards the perpetuity of state and capital, which are linked at source.

Hence, the British public evolves to funnel desire for popular sovereignty into a mode of parliamentary and corporate governance that is culturally presented as financially realist – limited by a ‘real world’ of necessary financial rationalisation.⁶ This is what is transmitted by a familiar, and familial, public ‘we’ (which we are not) ordinarily invoked by public commentators as the firmament of economic justice, indicating shared liberal beliefs and accepted welfare ‘support’ structures. Tellingly, this financial ‘we’ exists prior to each of us, and so is empty in human terms. This much is obvious from the way citizens are hailed as compulsory investors in defence, education, health and broadcasting, and cast as present or potential debt-holders and retail shoppers. The idiomatic insistence on a union of debt-bound public creditors, most often taxpayers, is historically trackable, but in recent years there has been a run on the rhetoric of this public ‘we’ and its consensual togetherness, underscoring the British binding of constitutional and capitalist continuity.

For example, the Better Together Westminster-led campaign against Scottish Independence before the 2014 referendum conjured a British public ‘we’ and a Scottish public ‘we’ – often confused and conflated – that were determined by a financial realism bound to the ‘costs’ of military defence (during ‘peacetime’), economic growth (especially as job ‘creation’), and the circulatory ‘security’ of the British pound.⁷ This ‘one nation’ campaign clearly built on the ‘all in it together’ political sloganising of the post-2008 austerity strikes and the widespread acceptance of London’s 2012 Olympics as ‘good value’ for the British public (despite the enormity of its various costs and its ceremonial glorification of union-as-enclosure).⁸ That the campaign also called on international economic ‘partners’ such as the US and China to insist that Scotland should not achieve statehood only reinforced the everyday public assumption that market-management defines freedom and futurity.⁹

This financialising ‘we’ is also evident in ‘softer’ displays of consensus, as when BBC Business Editor, Robert Peston, describes the British ‘we’ as a product of a postwar retail revolution. In Peston’s channelling of the BBC’s hegemonising voice, there is no question of our complicity with the postwar credit boom – ‘we’ remain seduced by, addicted to and responsible for Britain’s debts, unable to escape economic culpability and its consequential rationalisation of human behaviour and relationships (wherein ‘personal’ debt is casually equated to the ‘national’ deficit).¹⁰ In these and numerous similar scenarios, the British public ‘we’ can only make sense if recognised as the cultural encoding of a financialising imperative.

This financial realism is channelled through a network of public institutions and quasi-autonomous organisations that dictate the grounds of consensual togetherness. Such organisations and their representatives become skilled at performing inclusion, describing themselves and each other as universal providers, regardless of structural patterns of ever more uneven provision. While ‘public services’ alludes to communal provision, such services rely on a professionalised distancing of the population from the resources described as theirs. Nevertheless, the public ideology of compulsory inclusion is so strong that there seems to be something utterly counter-intuitive in pointing out that public services are not held in common – that it is not our BBC, our health service or our education system. On some level people do understand this, since trust in the public is exploded by everyday experience, by the lack of resources generally available (‘benefits’ and school provisions) and our inability to access and direct organisations said to be ‘ours’ (dentists, GP surgeries and the BBC).

Pulling on ‘everyone’ in the name of the public, these bodies act as a set of mutually self-reinforcing and state-aligned regulatory devices. This requires them to report on themselves and each other – measuring, supporting and strengthening a public operating through a sophisticated system of self-governing feedback. Crucially, their audit culture gives rise to a reformism that pre-empts, defines and co-opts – ensuring that the public can never become communal because it holds off demands by claiming that improvements are already in motion, and will bring ever-greater ‘value’. When ‘the public’ tells us that ‘the public’ has to be reformed, maintained and defended, its self-reflexive and foreclosing rhetoric is difficult to escape – a rhetoric within which a consensual ‘we’ agrees that the public is becoming, or can become, fairer and more equal, despite being premised on perpetual and dynamic inequality (hence, the relative gesture, fair-er). When in 1980 The Jam sang of ‘the public [that] gets what the public want’, they gave a mod-est insight into public reflexivity that still has to be unpacked: namely, how individual experience (the singularity of exclusion or independence, ‘going underground’) falls outside of the all encompassing claims of a public that speaks for and about itself, as if speaking to, for and as the people.¹¹

So, lurking behind the consensus of this financial ‘we’ and the public’s entrapping mode of reflexivity, is the question of how the public always precedes us, scripts our volition, cements our constitutional exclusion and demands our labour – in all its forms – with the familiar aim of upholding Britain’s place on the world stage.

The public extracts our labour

Questioning the dominant narrative of the public requires a moving beyond three supposedly naturalised binaries: public versus private, state versus market, and left versus right.¹² This may mean that our idiom, or mode of address, initially strikes as odd, perhaps as reactionary or ill advised. But we are arguing for the importance of destabilising the consensual public – a public that is squeezing the life out of all of us.

The duplicitous opposition between public and private remains a mainstay of set-piece political debates. Where ‘private’ is generally conceived of as the domestic, as enclosed, protected and often familial or individual, ‘public’ is idealised as open, collective and beyond or outside of domesticity and the excesses of individualisation. The British public, though, is underpinned by a parliamentary insistence on financial domestication – so that property prices, for example, are a ‘private’ concern underwriting the ‘public’ purse. In recent readings of the neoliberal marketisation of public services and institutions, much has been written on privatisation,¹³ but this literatur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: We Are Not the Public
• 2  The Public as Financial Trust
• 3  The Public as Cultural Commonwealth
• 4  Public Participation as Debt Demand
• 5  Public Reflexivity as Political Foreclosure
• 6  The Arts of Public Value
• 7  Coda: On Not Saving the Public
• Bibliography
• Index