Thursday, November 09, 2006
(added to notes on rhetoric)
The Pub The Pub is always a sign of blokish familiarity and common sense. Do end a discussion with “right, I’m off down the pub”, so indicating a sensibly English awareness of the limits of mere intellectual debate and touching base with the Real World. (The mere mention of this last is sufficient to debunk certain kinds of high-flown jargon.) Of course, this gesture (of touching base with The Real World) can be performed without having to visit the pub or even leave your armchair – you can also break off a debate by reference to some favoured TV program that requires attention, preferably ‘the football’ or something Popular (never, God forbid, ‘an Ingmar Bergman film’ or ‘a documentary about Heidegger’). Always remember: You are at one with the Common People (who go down the pub and watch telly) and not at all part of the despicable Middle Class/ Intelligentsia.
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11 comments:
Great, you're back.
'Fancy a drink?' doesn't mean, do you fancy a drink? It means, will you come with me to that place where we won't be able to hear each other talk in order to drink stuff that we could easily drink at home in a more comfortable chair and without someone moaning about asylum seekers in your ear. Luckily, they're closing by the score every week.
Great, you're back
I wouldn't go that far.
I don't really agree with either of you : I always have far better intellectual discussion in a pub than I do when friends come round to my place or I go to theirs. At home, I always feel vaguely on ceremony when people visit ; the pub is a neutral space. Also, the intellectualest of intellectual conversations always take place in the unlikeliest of pubs : one of my greatest nights in London was spent in a Morrocan bar which was playing hen-party classics (YMCA, hey Big Spender, etc etc), discussing the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.
Pubs do present people with obvious class dilemmas though. Put a cliched stereotype of a middle-class person in a "rough, working-class pub" and they will do everything they can to make the best of it, while patently hating every minute of it. Hence gastropubs, places where you can avoid the proles - though these are not, of course, places you could talk about Heidegger either. And places where you're more likely to hear people either moan about asylum seekers, or cheer the fact that, hoorah yes, we have another underclass who can do our dirty work.
Darn, I like pubs. And it gets lonely at home. I don't drink much these days though, so it can feel a bit pointless lingering over another Diet Coke while everyone else downs lager. Best pubs for me are backstreet boozers where I have often encountered what felt like friendship and kindness. Had many a conversation about politics, economics, immigration, love, god, truth etc in pubs. And laughed a lot too. I always record the documentaries about Heidegger, but end up watching The X-Factor repeat on ITV2.
Sorry, I wasn't talking about actual pubs, as such, but 'the pub' as invoked in blog and other rhetoric - see http://notesonrhetoric.blogspot.com/ for context.
All the pubs I've ever been in are full of drunks. I'm completely in favour of people being drunk but don't think I should have to spend time arguing with them. This is not for any puritanical reason, but simply because they will have forgotten about the argument tomorrow, whereas, I, who wasn't drunk, will remember it and was for five minutes deluded into thinking that something meaningful had happened. It hadn't.
In fact, the whole pubness of pubs is delusional, where people kid themselves that the booze is good (nine times out of ten, it's really shitty), the conversation is good (nine times out of ten, you only pretend you can hear what the other person is saying), it's matey (nine times out of ten the people in the pub don't give a toss about you and you don't give a toss about them). Three cheers for the case of the pub that is the one out of ten I wasn't talking about. In the meantime, the drunken twerps that roll out onto my street after the nightly lock-in in the pub over the road from my house are a walking testimony to the meaningless of the verbal element in the experience. Their utterances land up in my bedroom amplified by the sound-chamber of the street. If only the joys of drunkenness could be achieved without the accompanying rhetoric: 'you're the most lovely...you are the most...gimme a kiss...you are the most...i wanna say this...i love...no you're not fukkn listnin...i wanna say this...as sure as I'm standin here...you are the most...' (and so on until 1.24 a.m.)
Re "The Pub" as rhetorical device (as opposed to actually existing pubs, a subject on which that there is nothing interesting to say) - one thing I think you're missing from this entry is the way that Pubbishness is a code for Britishness, and specifically the sort of Britishness popular with New Labour, ie the sort that excludes Muslims.
Roundabout the time of the Danish cartoons row, I was struck by the number of anti-Muslim bloggers that regularly referred to pubs, beer, drunkenness etc etc - the implication being that this sacred part of Our Culture was under threat by those non-drinking Oriental types. A refusal to participate in pub culture = a refusal to integrate into British Values, a refusal to "let your hair down" and get pissed = incipient religious fanaticism etc etc.
Also on this note, if I recall correctly, the recent student elections at Manchester University saw a Respect-led bloc (broadly anti-war and anti-neoliberal) defeat a pro-war New Labour-led bloc that dubbed itself "Books and Beer".
No matter how rhetorical the device, its links to the real world are the reason why the rhetoric has any suggestive power. Apart from that outburst, I stand corrected and will not try and say anything interesting about pubs (real) ever again :-)
I'm not sure I agree, isak.
For starters, I don't think that, say, antisemitic discourse gained the traction it did because of its "links to the real world" - in fact the notion of such a Real World Link is typically deployed by apologists for racism/antisemitism etc: "I have nothing against the majority of moderate mainstream Jews, and antisemitism revolts me, it's just that a tiny minority of Extremist Jews who Really Are secretly controlling the world financial system give them all a bad name..."
Also, I don't think we have any conceptual access to the real world that isn't mediated by language - so I don't think one can simply privilege an extralinguistic reality in this way... it ignores the "feedback" relationship by which our take on reality is always-already coloured by the stories we have heard about it, so to speak.
Bit of a shame that this dialogue has leapt from pubs to Jews but anti-semitic discourse did arise in part out of a particular class/caste formation that Jews occupied in medieval Europe. Unable to regularly practice trade and other forms of employment, and with usury laws preventing Christians from moneylending and primitive banking activity, the Jews occupied a position in society of often being the monarchs' bankers and early states' moneylenders. Inevitably, this put Jews in a potentially hugely unpopular situation in which they could be accused of eg holding the country to ransom, grinding the face of 'decent' Christian merchants and trademen, being usurious etc etc. In other words the rhetoric did derive in part from some kind of reality.
Hmm, coupla points here:
1. This mediaeval structure of usury laws and regulations surrounding what Jews could or could not do for a living was dismantled in the course of the 19th century. Yet modern antisemitism only takes off in the 1890s, well after the formal emancipation of Jews.
2. I'm not suggesting there is no relationship between rhetoric and reality - the question is whether rhetoric's efficacy derives from its links to the real world. This I think is problematic. To take another example, consider the homophobic stereotype of the abusive and predatory gay man. This stereotype undoubtedly has some hold on the popular imagination - but is this because "some" gay men "actually are" abusive and predatory? I don't think so.
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