Interfering in Brexit: responsibility, representation, and the ‘meaningful vote’ that wasn’t

Abstract

This paper is an exploration into the phenomenon of Brexit, and how to approach it from the perspective of the critical humanities. Following calls by Edward Said and Lawrence Grossberg to cross the border between political science and cultural studies, this paper takes Karen Barad’s agential realist approach to rethinking responsibility as response-ability and diffractively reads it alongside the performances and practices of Brexit, as well as the political theory of Hanna Pitkin and Lisa Disch. This new approach is developed through a close analysis of the debates held in the House of Commons surrounding the deferred ‘meaningful vote’ on the Brexit withdrawal agreement. The paper is organised into three parts, corresponding to a representative’s responsibility on the: (1) local, (2) national, and (3) party level. As the deferred ‘meaningful vote’ did not happen, it will not be remembered as a landmark in the Brexit saga. This paper argues that precisely because of its unrealised nature, the deferred vote offers a potential space of resistance, contestation and transformation. The goal is to demonstrate that a greater understanding of the causes and consequences of Brexit can be achieved through the tools of the critical humanities, but that these tools can in turn be sharpened and reinvigorated as a result of said analysis.