Gordon, Paddy (2025) The Haunting of Flat Texts: Reading Contemporary Liberal Discourses for the Elision of Human Labour. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

This thesis contends that contemporary liberal discourses elide a rich and multi-faceted concept of human labour. Such a concept accounts for the myriad processes necessary to reproduce and sustain human life, and for how our collective labour – despite its historical variability – always brings into being both the world and the possibility of comprehending it. Employing a reading method informed by Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, I will analyse the online discourse produced by two “activist-influencers” – Jordan Peterson and Clementine Ford – who defined liberalism’s reactionary and progressive boundaries in the very recent past: from March 31 to September 30 2020, or the first pandemic half-year. Hauntology enables the researcher to read for absence as well as presence. Engaging with a centuries-long genealogy of liberal discourse, from Locke, Smith and Mill to Hayek, Rawls and Nussbaum, I will trace historical patterns of structural absence that continue to constrain and flatten the concept of labour that liberal discourses can express. To this end, my methodology involves first setting out and then locating six markers of labour’s elision that recur across liberalism’s variegated terrain. Ford’s and Peterson’s Instagram posts comprise my dataset, and each instance of micro-discourse analysed will contain at least one of the six markers. A hauntological heuristic combined with straightforward close reading can locate temporal, ontological, epistemic and political possibilities that dominant discourses close down. This approach fosters a sensitivity to the poetics, aesthetics and affective particularities of my data, as well as an attunement to the dialectical relationship between immediacy and mediation that defines online discourse. My contentions obtain empirical validity via a rigorous analysis that traces the consistent elision of labour in Ford’s and Peterson’s discourse, and by extension liberal discourse as a totality. Indeed, I will claim that it is only by eliding labour’s conceptual plurality and political possibility that contemporary liberal discourses proceed and proliferate. In our current conjuncture, the concept “labour” expands in tandem with the diversification and fragmentation of labour processes that humans concretely undertake, whether waged or unwaged, online or offline, or conceived as work or leisure. The elision of a rich concept of labour – and especially of carework, the labour of care – by six markers that reinforce the status quo has significant implications for liberal discourses’ ability to account for our current social conditions. These discourses struggle to imagine a future in which the majority of human beings achieve collective emancipation from the intersecting economic, environmental and epidemiological crises that haunt the present.

Search Google Scholar

Repository staff login