The Haunting of Flat Texts: Liberal Discourse and the Elision of Labour

ABSTRACT Using a method informed by hauntology, this article reads the discourse produced by two activist-influencers – Jordan Peterson and Clementine Ford – who currently define the liberal tradition’s reactionary and progressive boundaries. Locating consistent elisions of a rich concept of labour in the work of these representatives of contemporary liberalism, this article contends that a rich and multifaceted concept of human labour has historically been absent in liberal discourses. Indeed, it claims that it is by eliding labour’s conceptual plurality and political possibility that liberal discourses proceed and proliferate. Contemporary discursive ecologies contain multiple sites of reception, and the textual logic of social media often structures more traditional liberal texts. Despite this, long-standing structural elisions continue to constrain what liberal discourses can express. These elisions explain the inability of liberal discourses to adequately account for our current social conditions. Nor can these discourses imagine a future in which we achieve collective emancipation from the intersecting economic, environmental and epidemiological crises that haunt the present. This article argues that human labour – including and even especially the labour of care – is the liberal tradition’s foundational elision.