Time and Action in the Scottish Independence Referendum

Michael Gardiner

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137545930
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137545947
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book describes the recent Scottish independence referendum as the latest incarnation of a contest between two times on one hand, an ideally continuous time beyond determination underpinning financial sovereignty, on the other the interruptions to this ideal continuity inherent in human action.

1

The Undead, Again

Abstract: Over the past decade or so there has been much discussion of a ‘zombie capitalism’ that reduces all human time to an ‘undead’ time of labour. What is missing in this is an appreciation of the way the British state is itself constituted as nothing more than a shared belief in a financial future, demanding the conversion of all personal time to labour time. Militantly refusing to be limited by any specific history, the British constitution represents a dynamic and permanent continuity able to manage and stream out any shocks of the present. The 2000s return of Gothic imagery is apposite: self-determination is monstrous in taking a human time of life, death, and action, back from a time that is undead.

Gardiner, Michael. Time and Action in the Scottish Independence Referendum. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137545947.0002.

A common story told by British newspapers soon after 18 September 2014 was of a ‘revival of British politics’ by the Scottish independence referendum. The referendum created an ‘energised electorate’, its demands to ‘be heard’ had been registered, and ‘the battle for reform’ had now ‘moved to England’.¹ The referent of the referendum, that is, was British reform, and its demand was that Britain ‘reform better’, to ensure that ‘British politics is going to be different’.² This story of British political revival could only be claimed when the referendum had seemed to deliver the ‘warning’ of a near miss, so that reform/revival could be claimed by papers that had a few days before been instructing their North British readers to vote No. That this political challenge, a challenge I will describe as arising from outwith the time of British reform altogether, must be understood not only as British reform but also in retrospective terms – that is, never as action but as already narrated as a claim for ‘more’ representation, more inclusion – is fundamental for the British-left commentariat. And yet, in a way this commentariat will always miss, this was a very particular kind of ‘revival’.

Relative to the British state, self-determination does indeed mean the registration of life-time – a revival. Its temporal threat to the British state is what is described by this essay: an authority understood in terms of absolute continuity – undead time – is tasked with holding back time measured in terms of life and death, in terms of embodied experience. Something was ‘brought to life’ in the ’14 referendum, but it was precisely not ‘British politics’, since ‘British politics’, insofar as this phrase is meaningful at all, is defined by being beyond present determination. Here I argue that British authority specifically is always undead, but that this undead authority, this timeless authority, can become subject to a time of life and death, it can be made historical – and that these threats of self-determination were the subject of September ’14. This is something a British-left commentariat can never quite voice: the effects of September ’14 can’t be measured by the scale of parliamentary realism, or what I will call financial realism – they are the end of this realism. They are not a claim for ‘more’ inclusion, they are an end to an absolute form of inclusion which is ultimately inclusion into a financial sovereignty undeterminable by anyone.

This essay attempts to historicise some of the themes fundamental to Britain’s undead authority, or its absolute continuity. It suggests that the ‘eternalist’ time of financial sovereignty is underscored and strengthened by the British consensus often described as delivering to the people, and that this consensus was not overtaken but carried on and refined in the Thatcher years that have become a shorthand for ‘Scottish feeling’. As this essay understands it, it is not that after 2014 a struggle for action can be ‘consigned to history’, but more fundamentally that the ability to be historical, to act and have an effect on the environment in the present, is itself a politics in conflict with the principles of a state cultured as natural and permanent. This temporal division is much more basic than any psephology or voting behaviour of the kind implied by talk of ‘enlivening British politics’, or by claims that some political parties will shape up or reform and that British democracy will clean up its act to become ‘more’ progressive. What a look at this temporal division shows is that the problem with Britishness is not that it is not progressive enough, it is that it is absolutely progressive in a way that puts it beyond determination. Britain is ‘automatically’ progressive, it is a state born as the financial registration of a Newtonian motion that is always continuing but never determinable. And it is not that Britain is stuck in the past, since in a serious sense it has no past, it is pure continuity. The imagery of the undead is quite apposite in this sense.

Of course, the themescape of the undead is already quite familiar. ‘Neoliberal zombies’ have been stalking the land in popular culture since the 2007–2008 financial crisis (since what I will call the ‘Financial Blitz’). In the Gothic imagery, vampiric capital sucks the life-blood from a working population, allowing them neither life nor death, keeping them undead so it can keep harvesting their ‘blood’, their life-time. This neoliberal imagery of the undead has often powerfully shown labour’s desire take over the whole person – and yet what is so often missed is how Britain’s particularly full embrace of neoliberalism shows us that a challenge to undead labour is also a constitutional challenge. The demand for unified labour time is all that Britain is – undead labour is not just something that is protected by the state, it is what the state is made of. The ability to absorb action into a continuous time is the fundament of the British constitution, its financial principle that expects to be eternal, unlimited, informal, and able to outlast all republicanisms, communisms, fascisms, Jacobinisms, and self-determination movements, all of which belong to mere history. An absolutely continuous time demands a refusal of any registration of historical determination – thus the absence of a codified constitution, which would tie authority to a specific moment, and would make this authority merely historical rather than continuous-and-eternal. This helps explain the agitation over Scottish self-determination, like Irish and other constitutional threats before it: since it is eternal, the British constitution must be seen to be universal beyond any historical record across all of its territory.

The fissures in this totality are the story of 2014: we see what happens when a British commentariat seek refuge from the ‘excesses’ of capitalism within a desire to improve and reform a state whose job is to keep producing financial sovereignty, underwriting it apparently inexorably, the more vigorously the greater their radical credentials. In this sense British values are like a zombie touch, always dragging determining power back to the undeath of ‘the economy’ as the abstraction of absolute continuity. This essay suggests various historical reasons why 2014 shows that this absolute continuity is in trouble. It describes the 2014 constitutional contest – like all other contests over the ‘reachability’ of the British constitution – as a contest between two times, between the (financial) time of the undead and the interruptions that see time measured in terms of determination. The defining ‘cultural’ role of the British constitution is to absorb any such shocks of a determinable present, and to make this absorption seem enfranchising and desirable. Against which background, determinable time and action seem an unnecessary violence, a misconceived localism, a ‘nationalism’, while Britain is portrayed as what would be there naturally if no action took place, as itself having no action and no violence.

In a quite serious sense, the possibility of action signals a Gothic contest – which is why the imagery of the undead is so telling here. We know that classic Gothic appeared in the 1790s, when British government was strengthening itself as continuity against the spectre of the French Revolution – and that the Gothic suggests interruptions to this continuity with the return of the deathly, the monstrous, the ghosts who have crossed back over the veil of death and bring death with them, and the whole range of affronts to the uninterrupted stretch of authority back and forward forever.³ We know that high Gothic was a literature of deathly interruption to the assertions of continuity in the 1790s British security state – and the Gothic of self-determination in the 2010s is a set of interruptions working in exactly the same way. Did I think, I was asked during a London radio interview a few days before the referendum, that the Scots were trying to give Westminster a bloody nose? The Gothic imagery of blood is telling here: interruptions to the undead may be looking for blood, but the question shows that any such desire must be referred back to an eternalist and financial assumption of parliamentary representation, the very economy of representation that can never allow for any blood to be shown at all.

Moreover if self-determination, or action, is indeed a Gothic push for a determinable present, a present understood in life-and-death time, then it is also the push for a past. Despite the claims often made for it, the timeless British constitution has no respect for the past: since it depends on the evacuation of a determinable present, this constitution has no past. It has not ‘stood the test of time’ – it has never been in time, at least it has never been in a time based on experience. Or as high Gothic writers understood, the eternalist constitution does not venerate the dead, it eviscerates the dead, by condemning them to an undead time: in self-determination, the time of life and death is what is be put back in.

And since the constitutional authority of the undead can never be written, which would be to reduce it to mere history, it must exist as a belief. This authority must be, to use the seventeenth-century phrase instrumental to the creation of the British state, a form of natural reason. British rule, that is, is simply nature, as a vast body of Romantic literature would go on to affirm. This is to say that British authority must be able to unify experience, to strip out any experience of any specific historical time. It must make the kinds of demand to convert personal time to labour time that have become familiar from those critiques of neoliberalism which describe how enfranchisement means always more working, physically, psychologically, emotionally, a personal time ever more unified. Capitalism’s resistance of the time of life and death is well known by now – its willingness, for example, to place netting over the sides of production plants to stop workers from taking their own lives.⁴ For undead workers, the time of life and death comes to seem like a far-off dream, the dream described by Carl Cederström’s and Peter Fleming’s Dead Man Working as a craving of a human end to endless labour.⁵ Or as John Holloway has described labour, ‘the prolonged suicide of homogenous time’ – an infinitely slow delay of death.⁶ Or as in that most famous depiction of British consensus, the hopeless dissidents’ intonation, when finally faced by the thought police, of ‘we are the dead’, before they admit what they had always known, that there will be no death, that they cannot be martyred, that they have always already been removed from history to be ‘poured into the stratosphere’.⁷ These dissidents had known as much from the ‘memory holes’ there to absorb any experience that might be remembered and become history – and they map this understanding onto the absolute continuity of that moment of high consensus that is still celebrated as a peak of British values.

This essay understands self-determination as an attempt to subject this timeless constitution and its consensual extension into an embodied, experienced time. Often celebrated for an absolute form of inclusion that goes beyond historical context, this authority itself does of course have a history: specifically it can be traced from the creation of the British state at the end of the seventeenth century as a principle of continuity, as a guarantee of value across which of necessity it had to stand beyond any specific determination. The sovereignty thus made permanent is then something that needs to stand beyond history to codify human exchange – it is a financial principle that ‘flattens’ time, serves to unify any possible determining presents. For this I use the phrase empty time, a phrase sometimes associated with Benedict Anderson’s general homogenised time of the modern nation, but here used more specifically as the natural-and-eternal authority concretised at the end of the seventeenth century as the British state. Originally and permanently, British sovereignty is an emptying of time.

Notes

1 Libby Brooks (2014) ‘Scotland after the independence referendum: week in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Undead, Again
• 2  Empty Time
• 3  Cracked Realism
• 4  The Golden Country
• 5  The Spirit of 57
• 6  Permanent Labour
• 7  The Nuclear Eternal
• 8  Scotland, Queued
• Bibliography
• Index