It is probably not too dramatic to say that the UK’s EU
referendum result has sent a wrecking-ball through the political order. Many
articles have made such proclamations. We are now left adrift in the wreckage,
a wreckage that is documented in the rapidly multiplying reams of Brexit news
stories, commentary and explanation. It is hard to be sure of where we stand –
or what we stand upon. Echoing an observation made by
Foucault
in the mid-1970s, there is ‘a sort of general feeling that the ground is
crumbling beneath our feet, especially in the places where it seemed most
familiar, most solid, and closest to us’. We have probably all had moments, in
recent days, when we have felt disorientated amongst the wash of comment,
opinion, claim and counter claim. What permeates through this flow of
information and chaotic wrangling is an overwhelming sense of uncertainty. This
uncertainty is writ large in the many attempts to explain what has happened and
why. It just seems impossible to pin down the reasons and the consequences. The
cross-cutting divisions seem too hard to grasp, the old notions of social
divisions somehow seem to radically over-simplify what is happening or they
just seem outmoded as a framework for coherent explanation. The party political
divisions currently offer little hope to those seeking some sanctuary,
especially as the parties themselves have imploded over the results. The
various attempts to explain and understand the malaise reveal just how
impossible that task actually is.
Perhaps then, we can think of the moment we are experiencing
in terms of this existential and inescapable sense of uncertainty. In short, we
can’t easily explain what is happening because we are not sure. And neither
should we be sure. It seems a good moment to revisit and question a range of
our established certainties. There seems to be particularly profound danger in
any recourse to blunt and ill-informed certainties in this moment – such things
could easily fill the vacuum as people try to give themselves a feeling of
security and certainty in the onslaught of gusting insecurity and uncertainty. There
have been calls for
greater
understanding, and these should certainly be heeded. But they won’t come
easily given the current circumstances and how they might unfold in the coming
weeks and months. The difficulty of such a task is revealed when we think of
the emergent
class
divisions and the
sociological
complexity of the task at hand.
We can begin by trying to think of how we might imagine and
understand this prevalent state of uncertainty. By doing so we might be able
then to develop new types of understanding along with a less certain form of
social knowledge and even an ability to sensitize ourselves to the direction in
which things might be heading. There is something of the flavour of
Mikhail
Bakhtin’s carnival unfolding. The carnival, according to Bakhtin, provides
a moment in which the rules and norms of society are subverted, mocked,
disregarded and played with. The carnival, Bakhtin claims, brings the
‘realization that established authority and truth are relative’. The carnival
provided the opportunity for the hierarchies and social orders to be
temporarily disrupted. This is no celebration, but rather the release of
frustrations.
As I write this we seem to be living in a kind of carnival of uncertainty in which the
disruptive effects of the referendum have led to the unfurling disruption and
subversion of the social order. This might explain why the chaos seems to be
contagious and why we are finding hierarchies and social orders being so
frequently challenged. The carnival is being made possible by the shared sense
of uncertainty and the possibilities for reordering and redrawing the rules and
breaking established structures. The prevailing sense of uncertainty is
allowing the carnival to spread. It is facilitating the disruption, and meaning
that the uncertainty then comes to fuel its own presence.
The carnival of uncertainty is playing out in various ways
and with far from predictable or playful consequences. What will happen once
the carnivalesque moment has subsided, what of the previous social order will
be left? How different will things look once the subversion and disruption passes?
These are questions that will be difficult to answer. But they would suggest
that we will need to develop a new understanding of that emergent order and
what it will bring. It seems unlikely that we can or should retreat to the
safety of existing conceptions of the world and of how we can understand it
through categories, concepts and ideologies. As certainty returns, it doesn’t
mean that our certainties should return with it. We have glimpsed too much in
the last few days to know that the ‘fragments of modernity’, as
David Frisby once
called them, don’t necessarily fit together in the patterns and formations that
we may have thought that they did. It is going to take care and urgency to
ensure that the response is empathetic and progressive rather than destructive
and pathological. Social divisions never went away and neither did the tensions
between those, but they could easily get out of hand if blame becomes the means
to placate fear ease precarity. As the
fragments fall into place we are already seeing, in the form of
scapegoating
and
rising
racially motivated violence and abuse, that the fractions could open up in
scary and damaging ways.
Bakhtin’s point about the carnival was that it brought with
it a temporary period of disruption and a suspension of the social order, but
he does not say that society then goes unchanged by the carnival’s presence.
Things don’t necessarily go back to exactly how they once were. In the case of
this extreme version of a carnival, driven itself by the conditions of
uncertainty, it would seem highly likely that the disruptions, subversions and
re-orderings have already been far too great for this particular carnival to leave
no traces. One thing is clear, in the current conditions it is going to be very
difficult to be sure of what we are seeing, and it we do feel sure of what we
are seeing then we are probably misleading ourselves.
A shorter version of this piece was originally published in
OpenDemocracy.
David Beer is Reader in Sociology at the University of York,
UK.
