Hello again,
And back to the word submersible and the fact everyone has been using it. Well, not everyone. Last week someone I know got talking to an old man in a cafe. The kind of man who used to drink a lot and now doesn’t, so is a little lonely without pubs to go to. They texted me to say he brought the submersible up. I replied: Out of interest did he call it that, a submersible? They replied: No, he called it “that thing”.
But anyway I noticed a lot of people using submersible instead of submarine and I was curious as to why. The wikipedia pages for both words now refer to each other in the first and second line. I’m not sure if this was the case before this month. But now it says that a submersible is an underwater craft which needs to be transported and supported by a surface vessel or platform, where a submarine is capable of independent operation underwater.
It also says that submersibles tend to have a smaller range and may be connected by a kind of ‘umbilical cord’ to a platform or a submarine. Submersibles operate primarily underwater and tend to be smaller, with no living facilities.
So there is a difference, but not one which I think relates to why you would use it in a conversational sense. By that I mean submersible is the “right” word to use for the object, but the difference is technical enough that I don’t think it is a word you would need to use because to not do so would confuse the meaning of what you are saying. I imagine a lot of things that get called submarines are probably submersibles and broadly people would not have thought to correct themselves before.
I suppose the word submersible does indicate a flimsiness of the object, and so a sense that the project was dubious from the start. That could be why everyone was using it. But I wonder if it is also the case that it feels more authoritative to use a more technical term in an instance such as this one.
I know in essay writing that using more technical or less widely used words is an easy way to infer authority, even when these are slightly (or very) misused. You see this in the way a lot of people interact with Boris Johnson’s writing (I know he has appeared twice in two weeks but I assure you he likely never will again, I don’t think he’s very interesting). The same is true of using convoluted and clause ridden sentences, or old quotes from philosophers (even when these are either generic statements which have long since entered the realm of common knowledge or are questionably relevant to the essay’s argument).
Sadly I think this is because many people have an essentially fawning and uncynical relationship with the idea of institutional accreditation, and so gesturing at this accreditation appeals to that instinct. (There is basically a “This must be smart and interesting, it uses long words AND quotes Foucault”/”It’s brilliant writing, they have a *PHD*!!” thing, and I think it’s most rampant among well-heeled types, but more on that another time.)
Back to technical language and authority. I wonder if everyone using “submersible” instead of “submarine” came from an instinct to talk about the event in a way that sounded knowing, because, actually, it was very hard to process how bizarre it was.
I think advertising our knowledge about a certain topic to others can insulate us from having to think about it any more than we already have. I have noticed a similar thing with children, when they learn a new piece of information about something their instinct generally seems to be to explain it to another child. Often one who they consider themselves an authority figure to (a younger sibling, say).
I saw this sense of wanting to project authority in many of the “takes” about the submarine accident. They seemed so definitive so quickly. The “progressive” line on it seemed to be that everyone cared about the submarine because it was full of billionaires and nobody cares about migrants drowning at sea. There is an instinct now, always to compare things and measure them against each other (I wrote about this here), but I wonder if this does anything other than minimise the seriousness of, say, the plight of migrants drowning at sea.
I found the comparison very odd. I understand that both things happen at sea, but beyond that I wonder if there are any parallels. People risk their lives trying to reach another country because they have been forced into an untenable situation in the one in which they live. The motivation to travel in the submersible seems completely different. I think that’s part of what made the submarine incident so freakish, that the underlying reason the voyage had happened in the first place is quite difficult for the average person to understand (or me, anyway).
And what is the underlying motivation? There has been a kind of “progressive” politics for a while (although I do think it’s dying) which is basically performatively incurious and intractable, wherein you would say like: Because rich people are idiots, duh! And fair enough, if that’s your view. But there are a lot of ways to spend money being an idiot that don’t involve doing something so dangerous and, frankly, odd.
I’ve found myself wondering a lot about the motivation. It is a strange thing to consider. I was thinking about commercial space travel and what drives that. I think a lot of people fantasise about escaping from their current situation and this can be literalised as an environment. Going to New York, running away to a farm off grid, becoming famous, having an affair, having children, going to a forest in Borneo, etc etc forever. Going to space, maybe?
Once I remember someone telling me they weren’t happy because they lived in Manchester and it wasn’t a big enough city. When they went to London they were sure everything would change. When they got to London the problem was it was South London, East would be where it would all happen. Then they moved East and it became that New York was going to be it. I don’t think they’ll ever move there. I think they need to live like that, with a sense that their real life is off in the distance somewhere, waiting to welcome them.
I suppose they’re an extreme example. But I recognised something in them: that literal manifestation of a possible future. I wonder if something like the submarine or commercial space travel holds the same kind of promise, in a way. It is a literal means of moving further, being separate from other people, doing something new.
Being human in the society we have constructed does feel constraining often. It is strange to think that it wouldn’t stop feeling constraining if you had that much money. But maybe it wouldn’t. I have no way of knowing that; I don’t have that much money or know anyone who does to ask them.
But I have found myself wondering if that idea of sort of bursting out of a constraint was what made the submarine seem exciting. Maybe not, it may be another instinct that I really can’t conceive of and have no perspective on. I do wonder if there is any human instinct which I would find it impossible to relate to, but I don’t think I’ve lived enough to figure that out yet. Maybe I never will.
Till next time xxxxx
This Thursday!!! I am doing a “salon” with Celeste Marcus from Liberties if you want to join us, I think it will be fun. Here is a code for free tickets: Libertellect. I have an essay out with them soon which I’m excited about and we will be talking about my novel.
And pre-order links for Lazy City are here. Also I am doing an event at the Edinburgh festival on 26 August, you can now get tickets :).
Some Things I Liked Recently
This by Edna Bonhomme on how Haitians are perceived by Americans (and beyond) and how narratives of suffering can flatten the humanity of certain groups of people. I think the idea has much broader applicability too:
I learned very early that being Haitian meant having a memory of the country that contradicts the news. The rhetoric of chaos and terror is what most Americans are taught about Haitians and Haiti. Impoverishment is the avatar of how contemporary Haitians are perceived—which precludes reflection on anything else we offer.
The film Reality. It uses real recordings of a woman arrested for leaking confidential material. Dialogue is such an interesting thing to me in my fiction, it’s one of my main projects actually. And the dialogue in this film is all taken verbatim from recordings made during her arrest and questioning, which was really fascinating to me, because it did actually feel stylised in parts.
This on beige and boring lifestyles being seen as aspirational by Sarah Manavis:
Many of these celebrities openly marvel at the fact that they have become so famous despite their lives being so boring.
Weekly flowers!!!!!!!!!!