The trouble with “tropes”, in the age of high-velocity discourse analysis

The question of what somebody’s words mean is dissimilar to the question of whether there is an elephant in my living room. For all practical purposes, the answer to the latter is demonstrably true or false.

When it comes to interpretation, the important distinction is not true or false but “can” or should”. A phrase , a fact or an event can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. But that doesn’t make every interpretation useful. Some interpretations may coherently draw upon facts, but nonetheless obscure more than they illuminate.

Take Labour’s election defeat in 2019. I could make a coherent, fact-referencing argument that Labour lost because voters in the North were put off by Corbyn’s mostly-Southern accent. However, I will make no such case, since I do not think this interpretation illuminates very much at all.

When it comes to the charges of anti-Semitism that have been aimed at the labour left, and more recently at parts of the BLM movement, there are some some truths, and some outright lies, but most of the things we’re dealing with are arguable interpretations of other people’s rhetoric.

What comes up again and again is the question of “tropes”, and specifically the claim that criticisms that are formally levelled against Israel or Zionism may incorporate slanders that have historically been aimed at Jewish people. First let me be clear: this is a thing. “Zionist” does get used as a euphemism for Jew. However, whilst this can be very obvious when it’s some casualty-of-the-90s-rave-scene dribbling about the Rothschilds, the subject matter is not usually this clear cut.

One thing that makes it a messy business is the sheer diversity of anti-Semitic myth. Jew hatred has sprung up in a very wide variety of social and political contexts — from Norman England, to peasant Russia to the upper echelons of Parisian society. The “global Jewish conspiracy” has at once been seen as communist and capitalist. In short Jews have been accused of an astounding variety of crimes.

And then you have Israel whose actual crimes are many and multifaceted, from day-to-day violence, to the theft of resources, to the construction of an apartheid regime.

It is therefore almost inevitable that as well as the undercover mobilization of anti-semitic myths, there will also be innocent crossover — that genuine criticism of the Israeli state will touch on some of the same topics as current or historic attacks against the Jews. And this is where the business of trope-spotting can obscure more than it illuminates.

The important question to ask is not “can I spot an anti-Semitic trope in this rhetoric”. Rather it is “is this the most useful framework through which to interpret this person’s words”. Take Maxine Peake’s claim that Israeli security forces educated American police in the restraint technique that led to to George Floyd’s death.

You could argue that this was muffled way of reiterating the myth that Jews exercise dodgy cross-border influence. Or you could, as per some interpretations doing the rounds, connect it with the blood libel, despite Peake’s claim involving neither the killing of children nor the consumption of blood. Or you could see it as someone who has a longer record of anti-racism and internationalism making a connection between the counter-insurgency techniques of two allied, and deeply racist, regimes. To me, the final interpretation is really obviously the most plausible and sensible.

Then there’s the case @UKBLM — one of the two biggest online manifestations of the British Black Lives Matter movement. They have been under attack for the past week for tweeting:

“As Israel moves forward with the annexation of the West Bank, and mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism, and Israel’s settler colonial pursuits, we loudly and clearly stand beside our Palestinian comrades.”

Now in some quarters this was interpreted as reiteration of the myth that Jews control the media. Yet to me it is obvious that this tweet can be much better understood as a reference to RLBs sacking days earlier.

The politics of words has always been a messy business. Yet it has been been made much messier by the digitisation of the written word — and with it the rise of high-velocity, crowd-sourced discourse analysis.

To go back to my original example: I don’t want to push an unilluminating interpretation of why Labour lost because I’d like them to succeed. In the past we overwhelmingly had access to the words of those with whom we had some alignment. Or if not, to the words of people who we’d invested some time in understanding. In order to encounter the potentially controversial words of a right-wing Telegraph journalist, I would have needed to regularly purchase the Telegraph.

Now, however, things are very different. We have unprecedented capacity to scan through the words of those whom we might regard as our enemies and those whom we have invested little time in understanding. What’s more, it all takes place across crowded, highly gamified, high velocity platforms in which most things are unseen by most people, and interpretations rise to the visible surface based on their capacity to attract immediate attention. And what’s more, it happens in front of an audience that is primed for money shots of bad people doing bad things. This is where “Big Brother” the current of televised entertainment meets “big brother” the crowd-sourced panopticon.

This, btw, is why arguments around “cancel culture” — both for and against — miss the mark if they treat it as a closed phenomenon operating purely within the confines of the left. It is not simply a manifestation of the political weaknesses of the “identitarian left”. Nor is it simply the latest iteration of egalitarian resistance. It needs to be understood as the left variant of a much wider trend; of a trashily accusatory spirit arising from a particular technological moment; of the kind of thing that happens when the cost of critique has been reduced to something approaching zilch.

I cannot offer a solution to all of the above. But i can offer some thoughts on how to navigate this weird world. The first is: don’t expect that you can keep your hands spotless. RLB’s endorsement of the BOD’s pledges turned out to be something of hostage to fortune. In truth, you cannot maintain a lively engagement with current affairs whilst guarding absolutely against the possibility that something you say will be interpreted, by someone somewhere, as a misdemeanour. Secondly, think twice before giving a verbal kicking to a complete stranger based mostly on the interpretation offered by another complete stranger. And thirdly, let’s do what we can to support and build up the left’s independent communications infrastructure. The less that politics is mediated through the gamified mega-platforms and the click-hungry commercial press the better.