Description
Achille Mbembe diagnoses an ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ at the heart of postcolonial state power (1992). In the obscenity of its clientelism and the absurd ‘dramatization of its magnificence’, Mbembe suggests that the postcolonial state invites laughter from its subjects. Against common wisdom, however, Mbembe argues that this popular laughter does not pose a significant political threat to the operation of state-power. Instead, he suggests that the convivial, familiar vulgarity of the state ensnares the dominant and the dominated alike in an impasse of ‘mutual zombification’. The state’s grotesque displays of excess leave it incapable of addressing the material needs of its subjects, whose laughing acceptance render them incapable of collectively mobilising against it.
In this intervention, we draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s critique of Mbembe in order to consider the ways in which vulgarity, buffoonery and play have instituted a form of ‘zombification’ in the contemporary United Kingdom, focusing in particular on the 2010-2024 Conservative Government. We contend that this zombification closely relates to the increasing powerlessness of both the state and the citizen under neoliberal market-dependence and austerity. When politico-economic sovereignty pivots elsewhere, the clientelist state becomes an aesthetic site of vulgarity and excess and its disenfranchised citizens become routinely invested in its ridicule – neither capable of enacting lasting change. To explore this argument, we look at two sites: the carnivalesque revelry of the Johnson government’s COVID-19 response and the mockery faced by Liz Truss in her short tenure as a prime minister.
