The  Word Simulacrum

I had an animated conversation in an Edinburgh howf during the recent Festival. I attempted to record this dialogue of feeling within the standard structure of the article/essay-but failed. I couldn’t capture the passion of the trio who were urgently conscious of themselves within the shifting self-consciousness of the new Scotland. Edinburgh, celebrated for its ‘respectable antiquity’ was the initial subject of the debate but quickly assumed a national context and so I have attempted to record (liberally) the imitation of the action as a scene from an on-going drama. Should a reader seek to extend the drama please feel free to continue the dialogue.

A: Simulacrum!

B: Whit?

C: You’ve lost us. Come on, don’t hide behind your damnable Edinburgh intellect.

A: Simulacrum! A great new word I found just the other day.

B: Found? You had lost it?

C: You found it where? At the book festival I bet.

A: No, no.  Get in another round and I’ll tell you.

B: Bloody Edinburgh intellectuals; selling understanding for a mess o drink. (Leaves to buy.)

C: The church I once knew, would call it a kind of simony... a political simony.

A: Look there are 5 million plus folk in Scotland. 5,000 have power ... 5 million powerless, the rest, like us talk, think, drink  and talk again.

B: Here! Don’t choke. What about the word?

A: Yes. The word.

C: In the beginning?

A: Far from it. Jean Paul Sartre used it in his introduction to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

B: Missed that at the tech.

C: (Whispers) I bet he missed it too, even with a fkn PHd from Edinburgh Uni!

A: Now now youngster.  But you are half right. We discussed Fanon, tangentially, I remember. Reading the radicals with intent was just not on (unless you were politically well connected like AD.) Dare to quote them in yon Thatcher days and you might be listed.

B:..or lifted.

C: Afro-Caribbean revolutionary psychiatrists were never on my reading list.

B: So why this Fanon noo?

A: He died 50 years ago this year, in 1961. He finished his Wretched of the Earth just months before he passed and Sartre agreed to publish it and wrote a preface.

C: He comes up now in post-colonial studies.

B: Handy noo? So what about the word?

A: These wee haufs in here barely wet the throat!

C:  Aye 25 mls. Edinburgh’s knickers!

B: Scotland! We export sae much there’s no enough left so we get this wee moose-pee!

A: Ah well. Cheers!

C: Do we get the sermon?

B:.. on the mound!

A: Context! We cheered at the massive popular vote in May for the SNP.

B: Substantial vote but...

A: Just 20,000 more in the right seats and we would have taken all!

C: Ok! That’s May. But what the hell is next? Do they know? Does Salmon have the plan?

B: I was a simple leaflet-giving, chapper-on-doors. But the punters inside and outside the party don’t have a clue as to what’s really next?

A: And they are right!

C: Soft devo-max or Hard-on Independence!

A: Much more. The party constitution has a definition; the white paper -the  Alec conversation document has another; the election manifesto had a third and there was another election document on Independence offering a fourth version.

C: I had a letter in the Herald way back in 2008 on ‘the enigmatic question of Scottish sovereignty’-when I almost believed.

A: And you don’t now?

C: It’s your round!

B: It’s the old process or finished product argument.

C: The focus has to be on the sovereignty idea! What does it really mean?

A: Political power and constitutional authority over our national life!

B: When the World bank, IMF and European banks run oor economy!

A: But we will have our own voice at the table articulating our vision!

B: Hoad on there...that’s drink talkin’ but!

A: Or, to begin at the beginning, we find a nationalist simulacrum posing as sovereignty.

B: What..that word again? That’s lack o drink talkin.

C: My mobile dictionary tells me....Simulacrum ... a mere pretence, a shadowy likeness, a deceptive substitute.

A: Right! That’s what we might have struggled for ...a shadowy likeness of independence.  Are we aware I mean you and you and yes me, are we aware that we belong to a subject people?

B: Yes!

C: Eh ... a bit much!

A: Then Fanon, fifty years on has something to tell us. Cut out his plea for violence.  But listen to his essential cultural argument that we need a consciousness of our own being as a people, with power in our own nation,  through an empowering culture that comes in advance of politics or even the economic process.

C: Strange ... I’m reading Edward  Said at the moment -his Culture & Imperialism has quite a bit to say to us, right here and now in our Scotland!

B: It has helped you to believe again?

C: I’m eh ....swithering.

A:  It is vital that we have a programme that will animate, stimulate  and create a popular  consciousness  on  the idea of sovereignty... the need for sovereignty and the reality of sovereignty!

C:  What Freire called conscientization...an  understanding for social action.

B: My sister has a drama group-Acting for Change...a Green.

A:  If we don’t provide the concrete vision... we will lose again!

B: We’re good at that!

C: We Scots are intuitive losers...my English mother used to say.

A: No! We can win this thing. But we need to define our nationalism...it cannie be a magic wand... it can’t be an excuse for failure to deal with powerlessness in Scotland; for not dealing with real economic hardship in places like north Lanarkshire or for ignoring injustice or for the creation of  new jock-nationalist governing bourgeoisie! We can’t swap an arrogant London Raj with an equally arrogant Edinburgh elite!

C: Powerful stuff!

B: You’re getting roused!

A: Aye! But we need thousands to get roused... assert  our political identity without chauvinism but with the vision of a genuine popular victory for liberal nationalism.

B: National liberation?

C: Ca’ cannie!

A: Well hundreds of countries have decoupled from London’s imperial hegemony...we are kind of late ...but..

B: Aye there’s that the guid Scots word of doubt... but.

A: No! But without simulacrum! Without the shadow...Whose round is it?

B&C: Yours!

(We will leave them ....for now.)